Bioinformatics, Molecular Evolution, Homologous Proteins, Biological Information, Zuckerkandl, Pauling

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	Bioinformatics- Bioinformatics is the science concerned with the development and application of computer hardware and software to the acquisition;' storage, analysis and visualization of biological information. It has the following three chief components: (1) the development of new algorithms and statistics for assessing the relationships among large sets of biological data, e.g., DNA sequence data (2) application of these tools for the analysis and interpretation of the various biological data, inducing nucleotide sequences, amino acid sequences, etc. (3) the development of database for an efficient storage, access and management of the large body of various biological data.
The term 'bioinformatics' is a combination of 'biology' and 'informatics'. Bioinformatics developed in the wake of generation of amino acid sequences of proteins and nucleotide sequences of DNA. In 1962, Zuckerkandl and Pauling proposed that amino acid sequences of proteins may be used to study evolutionary relationships among organisms. This proposal was based on the observation that amino acid sequences of homologous proteins, i.e., proteins having similar functions, were similar. This initiated a new field of study called 'molecular evolution'. Subsequent researches have permitted inferences about evolutionary relationships from comparative analyses of amino acid sequences of functionally related proteins.