What are Databases..??

Databases

At the beginning of the "genomic revolution," a bioinformatics concern was the creation and maintenance of a database to store biological information, such as nucleotide and amino acid sequences. Development of this type of database involved not only design issues, but also the development of complex interfaces whereby researchers could both access existing data as well as submit new or revised data.

Ultimately, however, all of this information must be combined to form a comprehensive picture of normal cellular activities so that researchers may study how these activities are altered in different disease states. Therefore, the field of bioinformatics has evolved such that the most pressing task now involves the analysis and interpretation of various types of data, including nucleotide and amino acid sequences, protein domains, and protein structures. The actual process of analysing and interpreting data is referred to as computational biology. Important sub-disciplines within bioinformatics and computational biology include:

• The development and implementation of tools that enable efficient access to, and use and management of, various types of information;

• The development of new algorithms (mathematical formulas) and statistics with which to assess relationships among members of large data sets, such as methods to locate a gene within a sequence, predict protein structure and/or function, and cluster protein sequences into families of related sequences.

Biological databases

A biological database is a large, organised body of persistent data, usually associated with computerised software designed to update, query, and retrieve components of the data stored within the system. A simple database might be a single file containing many records, each of which includes the same set of information. For example, a record associated with a nucleotide sequence database typically contains information such as contact name; the input sequence with a description of the type of molecule; the scientific name of the source organism from which it was isolated; and, often, literature citations associated with the sequence. For researchers to benefit from the data stored in a database, two additional requirements must be met:

• Easy access to the information;

• A method for extracting only that information needed to answer a specific biological question.

Entrez

At the site of the NCBI, many of the databases are linked through a unique search and retrieval system, called Entrez. Entrez allows a user to not only access and retrieve specific information from a single database, but to access integrated information from many NCBI databases. For example, the Entrez protein database is cross-linked to the Entrez taxonomy database. This allows a researcher to find taxonomic information of the protein of interest. An overview of the most important databases is given in the part Databases on this site.