Abstract
The interdisciplinary fields of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology are
locked in a high stakes race with analytical instrument developers and
innovators. The pace and scope of change in many fields of biomedical research
rivals what we once associated only with semiconductor devices. This report
explores the interlocking challenges facing instrumentation advances,
computational demands and our evolving systems biology knowledge. Key
challenges presented in this report include:
- Instrumentation capable of generating terabytes of raw data daily
- Storage requirements for human gene sequences
- Need for cross platform data analysis standards
- Appropriateness of analysis & modeling applications
- Database data quality and annotation protocols
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology: Bottlenecks and Options reviews the
state of the art and aims to determine the significant technological and
market trends in the application of informatics and computation techniques to
biological research and drug discovery. The progress of molecular biology has
given us a profound understanding of human physiology and pathology at a
molecular level. However, we understand that a functioning organism is more
than simply a sum of chemical reactions. In recent years a concerted effort
has been directed at moving from a reductionist approach to understanding
physiology in an integrative systems framework complete with the associated
mathematical-based models.
The growth of systems biology has been aided by the availability of constantly
evolving computational capacity of cheap hardware as well as advances in
analytical research instruments capable in some applications of generating
terabytes of data each day. Such instruments are being used to make time
series measurements of multiple-analyte fluxes during the perturbation of a
physiological system. The robustness of such data are the building blocks for
computational biology.
This report describes the tension the combined fields of Bioinformatics and
Computational Biology are experiencing by first reviewing the capabilities of
innovative analytical instrumentation to generate terabytes of data and then
considering the availability of approaches, both in software and hardware, to
compress, store, retrieve and combine these data. The report identifies this
supply and demand as a strategic bottleneck issue. The discussion also
considers issues of cross platform data analysis standards and the appropriate
use of analysis and modeling applications on data quality.
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology: Bottlenecks and Options presents an
analysis of the state of the field in terms of the current systems biology
models and their applications, where the field is headed and the possible
implications for applied biological science. The report also includes profiles
of systems biology vendors and their products as well as a discussion of the
applications in areas such as personalized medicine and drug discovery. The
report closes with an overview of the strategy pressure points and the
interlocking challenges inherent with instrumentation advances, computational
demands and our evolving systems biology knowledge.
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