BIOLOGICAL DATABASES & DATA RETRIEVAL
Introduction to
Biological
Databases
NCBI
Nucleic
Acid
Databases
Organism
Specific
Databases
Molecular
Visualization
Tools
Sequence
File
Format
Biological databases and data retrieval is one of the essential topics to be assumed in the domain of bioinformatics. It serves as a repositories for vast amounts of biological data which ranges from protein sequences to genomic sequences and much more. These databases plays an important role in the biological researches thus providing fellow researchers or scholars to gain insights to valuable information. The biological data are generally used to access valuable information which is further analyzed, compared and interpreted to gain insights into multiple biological processes.
In bioinformatics, there are multiple types of databases are seen such as :
Sequence databases : These types of databases are used to store sequences of DNA, RNA and Proteins. Some of the databases include GenBank, EMBL, DDBJ, UniProt etc.
Structure databases : These are designed to house information about three dimensional structure of biological objects especially proteins. One of the best known databases that stores structure is PDB (Protein Data Bank).
Genomic databases : These databases stores the information of genomics sequences. Some of the databases associated with this category includes NCBI Genome, and Ensembl etc.
Metabolic pathway databases,
Expression databases,
Ontology databases etc.
In this unit, we will be focusing on various aspects of biological databases and tools to retrieve biological information. Some of the databases that we will be studying are namely Introduction to biological databases, NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information), Nucleic acid databases, Protein databases, Metabolic pathway databases, Small molecule databases, Organism specific databases, Molecular visualization tools and Sequence file formats.