Bioinformatics-Application in Basic and Applied Biology of Fish
by
Bimal P Mohanty
Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute- Riverine Division, 24 Panna Lal road, Allahabad
Coauthors: S. Mohanty (School of Life Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), D. Karunakaran (Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute- Riverine Division, 24 Panna Lal road, Allahabad - 211 002)

Bioinformatics is a comparatively younger discipline that bridges the life sciences and computer sciences. The explosive growth of biological sequence information has made it imperative to integrate these two disciplines. Organization and analysis of biological data are the main activities of bioinformatics. Algorithms to create, maintain and access the sequence databases are among the most important contributions that bioinformatics has made for the life sciences. In the flow of genetic information from sequence to function, the stored information is translated twice: first from DNA to mRNA in the process of transcription, then from mRNA to protein in the process of translation. DNA and protein sequence comparisons have become routine steps in biochemical characterization, from newly cloned proteins to entire genomes. Genomics attempts to make a complete inventory of genes and nucleic acid sequences. In contrast to genomics approach, proteomics attempts to study the expressed proteins. Protein manifest physiological as well as pathophysiological processes in a cell or an organism and proteomics describe the complete inventory of proteins in dependence on in vivo parameters. Proteomics is complementing genomics as a tool to study life sciences. The two key technologies in experimental proteomics are: 1) 2-D PAGE with image analysis and 2) biological mass spectrometry (MS) with database searching. 2-D PAGE technique is finding application in fisheries for identification of serum/plasma proteins that might be involved in the constitutive resistance to infections, muscle protein characterization, and biochemical analysis of cross-reactive antigens, understanding the molecular pathogenesis and genetics of disease resistance. We are developing 2D-refernce maps of commercially important fish and shellfish and plan to construct an index of the piscine proteins, by the construction of 2D-database that may be useful in identification of quantitative trait loci (QTL).

Date received: November 12, 2002