Home > CSSS Seminars > Rolf Apweiler   Rolf Apweiler EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom "Swiss-Prot, TrEMBL, InterPro: Core Bioinformatics Resources for Proteomics and Genomics" Throughout society the increasing sophistication to store, manipulate and communicate information has transformed the way we work. In particular, the opportunities and pitfalls for science opened up by information technology are profound. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in molecular biology. The information of life - DNA coding for complex proteins involved in intricate biological processes - has become accessible during the last decades; fortuitously an era when computer hardware and methodology has seen a comparable revolution. The way scientists deal with data has been completely transformed. It is possible to collect, analyse, communicate and share huge amounts of information rapidly and accurately. Molecular biology, driven by the need to deal with large volumes of information, was quick to embrace the electronic medium; particularly to build large collections of shared scientific information. Substantial international efforts now support databases of nucleotide sequences, protein sequences and protein structures. Aside from these major projects, numerous other shared information repositories developed. Exploiting the complexity of the biological information using sophisticated information technology requires substantial technical expertise, and the volume of information is growing exponentially. While there is a vast amount of valuable information, it often exists as islands, with little interconnection, it can be ill defined and difficult to use, and there is little to help the user distinguish between high quality and low quality information. Nowadays, access to and skill in exploiting information repositories is crucial to biological research, and it is on resources like Swiss-Prot, TrEMBL, and InterPro, their history, their usage, their advantages, their pitfalls, and how scientific progress leads to new challenges for bioinformatics and the development of resources for biological information that my talk will concentrate.
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