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What bioinformatics can tell us about ourselves and our environment?

With life sciences entering the realm of "big science", computational tools are playing an increasingly important role in transforming biological data into knowledge. The tutorial will start by looking at DNA sequencing (the deciphering of genetic information), and show how bioinformatics underpin all stages of this fast evolving technology. We will see how state of the art sequencers now come equipped with high performance computers for data acquisition (e.g. image analysis) and data processing (e.g. DNA sequence assembly). Querying of the largest DNA sequence database (GENBANK) will be demonstrated online, together with a tour of the ENSEMBL human genome browser. We will explore what bioinformatics tools can tell us about unknown DNA randomly sampled from the oceans during a metagenomics expedition (does the DNA code for a protein? what might be it's function? what species does it come from?). Finally, the issues of data storage (e.g. Laboratory Information Management Systems) and data exchange (e.g. XML formats) will be illustrated with DNA microarrays, a technolgy used for massively parallel measurement of gene expression levels.