BIOINFORMATICS DIGITAL LIBRARY

BIOINFORMATICS

Bioinformatics is a science, which developed from integration of Biology and Information Technology (IT). It is a multidisciplinary field comprising of Molecular Biology, Genetics, Mathematics and Computer Science. Today, Bioinformaticians are in great demand in academia as well as in industry. The major goal of the bioinformatics is storage and meaningful analysis of raw biological data knowledge discovery. Researchers, students and faculties working in Bioinformatics regularly seek information from the library resources in Bioinformatics research.

AREAS IN BIOINFORMATICS

Bioinformatics has evolved into full-flagged scientific discipline over the last decade. The definition of Bioinformatics is not restricted to Computational Molecular Biology or Computational Structural Biology. It now encompasses fields such as Comparative Genomics, Structural Genomics, Transcripteomics, Proteomics, Metabolic Pathways Engineering as well as Computing and Mathematical Techniques. Developments in these fields have direct implications to health care, medicine, discovery of new next generation drugs, agricultural products, environmental protection etc.

Digital library aims to extend support to expand the services to Bioinformatics development at the single platform. It can also provide services like the searching of primary literature; genomics sequence databases, data and knowledge management and communication. These integrated services provided by Bioinformatics Digital Library can enhance the skills of Bioinformatics professional significantly.

INFORMATION SOURCE ON BIOINFORMATICS

Established ideas and methods are constantly being refined and are appearing in journals, books, software packages, and through Internet technology or web documents and published documents. With the intervention of Internet and computer network models, the distribution of information became faster and efficient. The Bioinformatics information is now available throughout the world to the scientific organizations with the help of Internet. National Medical Libraries are the prime sources of information for biomedical researchers. The science of informatics is concerned with the representation, organization, manipulation, distribution, maintenance and use of information, particularly in the digital form.

(a) Digital Library: Digital Surrogate Created from the traditional information sources.
(b) Bioinformatics: The Information related to Bioinformatics, Genomics, Proteomics, drug design, Biological Computation, Molecular modeling, and Chemo-informatics.
(c) Program and Research: Information about institute running courses and programs in various disciplines and career opportunity in Bioinformatics.
(d) E-Resources: comprises link to Internet resources of electronic journals, electronic books, and e-patents information. Some of the important digitally accessible e-journals are included in this section are:
a) Genome Research: http://www.genome.org/
b) Protein Science: http://www.proteinscience.org/
c) RNA: http://rnajournal.org/
d) Bioinformatics: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/
e) Nucleic Acid Research: http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/ and so on. About more than 100 such open access journals links has been provided to access the scholarly peer reviewed journals.
(e) Biological Database Information: The Bioinformatics more dependent on the biological database information to carry out R&D activities. These databases are related to nucleic acid information, proteins, genomics and proteomic information. The various
Organizations and institutes which are providing storehouse to this information for the global access to databases are given link in this section. Some of the important centers are:
a) Protein Information Resources: Located at Georgetown University Medical Center. http://nbrf.georgetown.edu
b) Nucleic Acid Database: Sequence Retrieval Systems (SRS). http://www.srs.ebi.ac.uk
c) EMBL: http://www.ebi.ac.uk
d) DNA Databank of Japan: http://ddbj.nig.ac.jp/
e) Protein Sequence Data Bank: Swiss-Prot. http://www.ebi.ac.uk/swissprot etc.
(f) Literature Databases: The literature resources play and important role in R&D activities in any of field. The some of the important literature sources on Bioinformatics are:
a) ENTERZ: Enterez is search engine for life science literature. It is text-based search and retrieval systems for various services including PubMed, Nucleotide and Protein sequences, Protein structures complete genomes, Taxonomy OMIM and many
others.
b) PubMed: It is available via NCBI Enterez Retrieval Systems developed at NLM, USA

c) MEDLINE: Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval Systems Online is the primary component of PubMed providing literature services of NCBI.

In addition to this there are hundreds of e-journals are available through UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium and NCSI (National Centre for Science Information, India).


PRAKASAN. P.M
M.L.I.Sc., M.Phil., NET
Librarian, Dept. of Botany