Bioinformatics Interview Preparation Guide

The mathematical, statistical and computing methods that aim to solve biological problems using DNA and amino acid sequences and related information is known as Bioinformatics.

Today, we can use computers to access much more biological data than ever before. You can learn a lot by analysing this data. For example, you can identify genes by comparing genomic data across organisms and identifying patterns in the data. Insights as to the structure of proteins can be obtained through computer analyses of the protein sequences. These approaches are a lot faster and a lot cheaper than relying solely on wet lab or X-ray crystallographic techniques. Of course, computational techniques are often not as reliable as getting the first-hand view of the molecules. Clearly, you need both worlds: you need to take advantage of the computer tools when you know the predictions are reliable and use the more expensive techniques (in the wet lab) when you can’t get away from it.

One chromosome of a pair is called homologue.In Homologous pair two identical chromosomes are present. Each one chromosome in a Homologous pair is called Homologue.

Looking at what the academic world is publishing, microarray research is really hot right now, and people haven't quite figured out what the best way is (some might argue if we should even be trying) to store, process, and understand this data, but there are lots of interesting ideas.

Accession number (bioinformatics), a unique identifier given to a biological polymer sequence (DNA, protein) when it is submitted to a sequence database.

The sequencing of the human genome has just been completed and in the next two or three years I expect progress will be made in identifying the genes. Right now, we don’t even know how many genes we have! Also, in the next two or three years, we’ll be learning more about the structure and function of proteins in the cell. Hopefully, in the longer term we’ll be able to piece together that information to get a more complete picture of regulatory networks in the cell.

There are three kinds of DNA sequences. Genomic DNA comes from the genome and includes both genes and extragenic material.

cDNA is reverse transcribed from mRNA and corresponds only to the expressed parts of the genome.

Recombinant DNA is man-made and is composed of artificial DNA.

My background is in computer sciences, including design of algorithms and theoretical computer science. I got interested in this because of some work in an area called DNA computing. That idea is to build computers out of DNA. The person who started that line of work - is a computer scientist who spent a quite a bit of time in a biology lab. His work really caught the attention of many people in the computer science community. But then, as I got more interested in some of the algorithmic problems that come up, I realized they are also relevant in the more traditional biological areas. You have to talk to chemists and biochemists if you want to understand DNA and RNA - you can’t get the right level of understanding just from reading papers. I got more interested in their perspectives and problems.

This means that purchase a BigDye terminator kit from our facility and run the cycle sequencing reaction and post clean-up. We recommend using Princeton Separations Centri-Sep spin columns or Abgene Dye Terminator Removal Plates.
Drop off your sample in the form of a dried pellet in 1.5 ml eppendorf tube along with your request form. Your dnalims request order will have Seq_Drop_Off selected under Service Requested, and have no selected under Spin-Column Clean-up.

For PCR product size of product(bp)/50 = ng DNA. For plasmid up to 10.0 kb 250-300 ng. For genomic DNA 2.0 microgram.