Job opportunity in bioinformatics Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Job opportunity in bioinformatics - Term Paper Example Bioinformatics is, therefore, an extensive field with many job opportunities both directly and indirectly linked to it. This paper presents some of the employment opportunities. The first job opportunity that bioinformatics presents are sequence analysis. Sequence analysis was first done in 1977 when the phage ÃŽ ¦-X174 was sequenced. The job involves decoding DNA sequences and storing the information in databases. The sequence analysts then analyze the data to find out the genes that code for proteins and other structures in the sample. This has led to the discovery that comparing the genes within organisms of the same species, or different species reveal similarities in the functionality of their proteins. However, the growing amounts of data, means that it is no longer possible to analyze DNA sequences manually. Sequence analysts have, therefore, developed software that search the genome of millions of organisms, consisting of billions of nucleotides in databases (Levine 4). The programs can make up for mutations in DNA sequences, so that they can determine related but identical sequences. A variation of the sequence alignment is used in the sequencing p rocess. The shotgun sequencing technique gives the series of thousands of small DNA structures. It produces the sequence data quickly but does not assemble the fragments quite fast for complicated genomes. Another job area of bioinformatics in sequence analysis is in the automatic search for genes and regulatory sequences within genomes. However, nucleotides found in genomes are not all genes. Bioinformatics is vital in bridging the gap between genome and proteome projects like in using DNA sequences for identifying proteins (Levine 5). Bioinformatics knowledge is required for a job in genome annotation. Genome annotation is the process of marking the genes and the other biological features in DNA sequences. Owen White designed the first