Bioinformatics is a relatively young, cross-disciplinary research area at the intersection of the biological sciences with the mathematical, statistical, and physical sciences and chemistry and information technology. In the past decade or so, there has been phenomenal growth of life science databases. For example, the most widely used nucleotide sequence database is Genbank that is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the US National Library of Medicine; as of February 2008 it contained approximately 86 billion nucleotides from 83 million sequences. Its size continues to grow exponentially as more genomes are being sequenced. However, there is a very large gap (that will take a long time to fill) between our knowledge of the functioning of the genome and the generation (and storing) of raw genomic data. This overview touches briefly on those aspects of bioinformatics that will be of interest to statisticians.
The stated goal for many researchers is...
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References and Further Reading
Ewens WJ, Grant G (2005) Statistical methods in bioinformatics, 2nd edn. Springer, New York
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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Wilson, S.R. (2011). Bioinformatics. In: Lovric, M. (eds) International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04898-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04898-2_4
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