Role of bioinformatics databases in functional genomics and metabolic engineering researches

Abstract

Genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics data mining are some of the interdisciplinary and emerging fields of bioinformatics that are evolving rapidly, making it difficult to predict the magnitude and pace of change. Bioinformatics tools have become an important means for researchers to conduct research. Such tools provide easy access to large datasets spanning genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, epigenomes, and other ‘omics’ generated over the last decade. This chapter describes the use of bioinformatics tools found in numerous databases, such as Bio-Analytic Resource for Plant Biology, Protein Sequence Analysis and Classification Database (InterPro), Comparative Toxicogenomics Database, Plant Comparative Genomics Portal (Phytozome), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes, The Arabidopsis Information Resource, and ExplorEnz-Enzyme database (IUBMB). Therefore, this chapter defines data mining as an efficient method of extracting new information or new knowledge from large data sets or databases. However, new information that reflects the underlying biological processes can potentially be useful in biotechnology and biochemical research. Finally, this chapter briefly discusses some of these tools and scenarios that may be useful to scientific researchers.