The role of biological information in biological research.
Biological information refers to all the information contained in organisms, such as genome information, protein, nucleic acid, sugar and other biological macromolecules.
Biological information plays an important role in the survival and reproduction of organisms. Biological information contains a wide range. In addition to genetic material, nerve impulses and hormones, the sound, smell, color and behavior of organisms all contain information, which affects individuals and groups of organisms and is inseparable from their survival and evolution. Biological information is characterized by huge biological effects with little energy and material consumption.
Biological information can generally be divided into genetic information, nerve and sensory information and chemical information. Although the carriers of genetic information and nerve sensory information belong to chemical substances, chemical information usually refers to the information carried and transmitted by chemicals other than the above two substances. Hormones of higher organisms and pheromones of insects belong to this category.
Genetic information refers to the information that an organism passes from its parents to its offspring in order to copy the same thing as itself, or the information that each cell passes from one cell to another every time it divides, that is, the arrangement order of base pairs (or the arrangement order of deoxynucleotides of DNA molecules). Genetic information is stored in the form of code on DNA molecules and transmitted to future generations through DNA replication. During the growth and development of offspring, genetic information is transcribed from DNA into RNA, and then translated into specific protein, which performs various life functions. Historically, the concept was first formed by the research of G.J. Mendel (1866), that is, the factors corresponding to various biological characters (now called genes) contain corresponding information (later, G.Beadle et al. (194 1) initiated the research on genetic biochemistry and drew a picture.
With regard to the chemical properties of genes, according to the transformation experiment conducted by O.T.Avery et al. (1944) using the DNA of Escherichia coli phage and the character expression experiment conducted by A.Hershey and M.Chase( 1952), it has been clarified that DNA is the carrier of genetic information. With the development of additional DNA structure research, the concept that the information possessed by genes can represent the base arrangement of DNA has been established. When expressing information, the base arrangement of DNA is transcribed into the base arrangement of RNA, and then protein is synthesized according to this arrangement. The carrier of genetic information of some viruses is RNA instead of DNA. Genetic information includes not only the genetic information corresponding to protein, but also the information necessary for reading and controlling the expression of information and all the information necessary for an organism to replicate the same structure with itself.
Nerve and sensory information are carried and transmitted by electric pulses and neurotransmitters. The nervous system receives information from the internal and external environment, processes it, and regulates and controls the functions of various parts of the body. Living things are carried and transmitted by electric pulses and neurotransmitters in the nervous system. The function of the nervous system is to receive and transmit information from the internal and external environment, and to process and analyze it, so as to control and adjust the functions of various parts of the body and make appropriate responses to the environment. Therefore, neural information plays a vital role in the survival and normal life of organisms.
Chemical information is information transmitted through chemical media except the above two substances. The reason why various functions of organisms can be carried out in an orderly manner and can respond to the environment in time is because there is an information system transmitted through various chemical information molecules in organisms.
Biological information plays an important role in biological research. However, after the original biological information resources are excavated, life scientists are faced with severe challenges: what information is contained in hundreds of millions of ACGT sequences? How does this information in the genome control the development of organisms? How did the genome itself evolve? The advanced stage of bioinformatics industry is reflected here, and mankind has since entered the post-genome era centered on bioinformatics. The new drug innovation project combined with bioinformatics is a typical application at this stage. Therefore, bioinformatics is an important application of biological information in biological research.
Bioinformatics is a science that uses computers as tools to store, retrieve and analyze biological information in life science research. The research object of bioinformatics is biological information. Its research focuses mainly on genomics and protein omics, specifically, it is to analyze the biological information of structure and function expressed in the sequence from nucleic acid and protein sequence.
Specifically, bioinformatics, as a new discipline, takes the analysis of genomic DNA sequence information as the source, simulates and predicts the spatial structure of protein after obtaining the information of protein coding region, and then designs the required drugs according to the function of specific protein. Genome informatics, protein spatial structure simulation and drug design constitute three important parts of bioinformatics. From the specific content of bioinformatics research, bioinformatics should include these three main parts: (1) research on new algorithms and statistical methods; (2) Analysis and interpretation of various data; (3) Develop new tools to effectively use and manage data.
Bioinformatics, as a powerful weapon in genome research, is widely used to speed up the process of searching for new genes in order to register "useful" new genes first. In this global competition, how to combine the objective situation of China's scientific research level and advantageous fields, put limited investment into it, and get the greatest scientific research and commercial returns as much as possible is an unavoidable new topic for Chinese scientists and decision-making departments.
Main research directions of bioinformatics: genomics-protein omics-systems biology-comparative genomics. With the milestone progress of the biological genome sequencing project, including the human genome project, the resulting biological data, including the birth and death of organisms, has increased at an unprecedented speed, and has now reached the speed of doubling every 14 months. At the same time, with the popularity of the Internet, hundreds of biological databases have mushroomed. But these are only the acquisition of original biological information, which is the primary stage of the development of biological information industry. At this stage, most bioinformatics enterprises make a living by selling biological databases. Celera, which is famous for sequencing the human genome, is a successful representative of this stage.
To sum up, the study of biological information plays an important role in the vigorous development of biology.