STUDY OF EVOLUTIONARY PATTERNS IN WHOLE GENOME SEQUENCES: A CASE STUDY OF BACILLUS GENOMES

Abstract

With rapid advancement in data storage and processing technologies, it is not possible to analyze huge amount of data and make it meaningful by sophisticated visualization tools.The IT revolution that is taking place now has a tremendous impact in research and determining activities in a big way[1]. It is not possible to undertake large scale problems and get solution within a timeframe. Needless to mention next generation sequencing technologies produce large amount of raw genomic data that needs to be analyzed. Thus IT tools have become an important part of biological research. It is found to be very useful in deciphering enormous information in the length of genomic sequence. With the rapid advancements in data capturing technologies with advanced experimentaland computational tools, it is possible now to obtain the whole genomedata of any organism within a short period. Sequencing era started with the methodproposed by Sanger. This approach made a great impact in biological science tostudy disease related proteins in particular. The race was on thereafter to come upwith better and faster ways of sequencing the DNA.[3] The raw one- dimensional genomic sequences, which are nothing but long character strings, can be processed or analyzed using existing powerful algorithms from the field of computational sciences. Bioinformatics/ Computational Biology, a field which deeply focuses on application of IT tools and techniques to sequence structure expression and other types of data is increasing getting importance in biomedical field. Generally the following types of analysis are carried out routinely using bioinformatics tools: Compositional Analysis, pattern searching, alignment between two sequences and group of sequences, alignment between a sequence and database, evolutionary analysis, protein structure prediction (secondary and tertiary), screening potentially large molecules for drugs, comparing x-ray structures of proteins, carrying out large scale simulations of biomolecules and many more.