Concept of Bioinformatics, Impact of Bioinformatics in Vaccine Discovery

Concept of Bioinformatics

Biological data is stored, analyzed, and disseminated via bioinformatics, a interdisciplinary field consisting of both biology and computer science. An application of bioinformatics is to determine the function of genes and proteins, to establish evolutionary relationships, and to calculate the three-dimensional shape of proteins by using computer programs.

The following three components make up bioinformatics:

• Analysis of data and interpretation
• Development of algorithms and statistics
• Creation of databases

Bioinformatics enables comparison, analysis and interpretation of genetic and genomic data and the better understanding of evolutionary aspects of molecular biology through the use of tools. Integratively, it assists in analyzing and cataloging the biological pathways and networks that are key elements in systems biology.

There are two branches of bioinformatics such as

• Plant bioinformatics
• Animal bioinformatics

Bioinformatics in Vaccine Discovery

COVID-19 is caused by SARS-CoV-2, which is now known as Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). By 19th April 2020, the disease had spread to over 200 countries, causing more than 160,000 deaths since its first detection in December 2019. People who come in contact with an infected person can contract this highly infectious virus through respiratory droplets and aerosols. As the world struggles to hold on to life without drugs or vaccines, the disease is slowly taking over.

Therefore, researchers from around the world have started sharing and collaborating their research data to speed up the development of a cure. A drug or vaccine against this deadly disease can be developed using this information, as it provides critical insight into the virus' genetic makeup. Because of this challenging scenario, Bioinformatics has proven to be one of the most valuable tools in analyzing viral data. Bioinformatics reduces the cost of research significantly by predicting possible directions from hundreds of possibilities. It is possible to use bioinformatics to analyze large amounts of data to formulate a hypothesis that can then be tested in the laboratory. A bioinformatics analysis of available data can help determine which experiments to perform, instead of performing a bunch of them without clear objectives.

Research can be saved both in money and in manpower in this manner, as well as getting results rapidly. A crucial role that Bioinformatics is playing in the current COVID-19 crisis is the prediction of appropriate drugs against viral targets, which are then being tested and validated in the laboratory. In the laboratory, bioinformatics can predict molecules that are likely to inhibit the virus, and therefore develop a powerful drug against COVID-19. The Bioinformatician can predict potential drug molecules by using various computational tools or programs he has written. It requires several steps from sequence analysis to the final drug candidate prediction, which can broadly be divided into five segments –

• Comparing the sequence data to those of other viruses,
• Using the nucleic acid database to retrieve the viral sequence,
• Analysis of viral proteins as drug targets based on computational modeling
• To investigate how the target virus developed from other viruses, phylogenetic analysis of viral sequences is performed,
• Then, test several molecules for their inhibitory activity against viral proteins.

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