Trec Genomics Special Issue Overview

摘要

Recent advances in biotechnology have changed the fundamental nature of biological research. Whereas scientists used to be able to manage their modest amount of experimental data in paper notebooks or simple spreadsheets, new tools such as gene chips for measuring gene expression (Mobasheri et al. 2004) or sequence variation (Pennisi 2007) have fundamentally altered their work. Not only do these gene chips generate massive amounts of data (as much as tens of thousands of data points per biological sample), they uncover potential associations and interactions with a wide variety of genes, diseases, and other biological entities. The field devoted to managing, utilizing, and evaluating this data is called bioinformatics (Baxevanis and Ouellette 2005), which is sometimes described as the intersection of biology (or biomedicine) and computer science.