Scope of Genetic Engineering And Bioinformatics

Scope of Genetic Engineering

i.         To manufacture drugs and other life saving bioproducts such as insulin, growth hormones, interferons, cytokines and monoclonal antibodies.

ii.             For environmental management to reduce or abate the pollution load in soil or water.

iii.              In waste recycling to increase productivity.

iv.              In plant breeding by the incorporation of useful genes (nif genes = nitrogen fixing genes).

v.                In bringing pest resistance in agriculture crops.

vi.              And in treatment of diseases by way of gene therapy etc.

Such genetic engineering and biotechnological processes involve knowledge of enormous number of genes, their cooling and thier protein sequences. Computers and newly evolved software packages are utilised for these purposes. Thus biological studies are provided with a support from electronic computers. This new integrated field constitutes Bioinformatics.

Scope of Bioinformatics

1.Bioinformatics helps to create an electronic database on genomes and protein sequences from single celled organisms to multicellular organisms.

2. It provides techniques by which three-dimensional models of biomolecules could be understood along with their structure and function.

3.  It integrates mathematical, statistical and computational methods to analyse biological, biochemical and biophysical data.

4.Bioinformatics deals with methods for starting, retrieving and analysing biological data such as nuclei acid (DNA/RNA) and protein sequences, structure, functions pathways and genetic interactions.

5. The computational methods in bioinformatics extend information for probing not only at genome level or protein level but up to whole organism level, or ecosystem level of organization.

6. It provides genome level data for understanding normal biological processes and explains the malfunctioning of genes leading to diagnosing of diseases and designing of new drugs.