Neuroscience in Bioinformatics
Neuroscience (or neurobiology) is the scientific study of the nervous system.It combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, mathematical modeling, and psychology to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons and neural circuits.The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "ultimate challenge" of the biological sciences.
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Bioinformatics is both an umbrella term for the body of biological studies that use computer programming as part of their methodology, as well as a reference to specific analysis “pipelines” that are repeatedly used, particularly in the field of genomics. Common uses of bioinformatics include the identification of candidate genes and nucleotides (SNPs). Often, such identification is made with the aim of better understanding the genetic basis of disease, unique adaptations, desirable properties (esp. in agricultural species), or differences between populations. In a less formal way, bioinformatics also tries to understand the organisational principles within nucleic acid and protein sequences.
Neuroinformatics is a scientific study of information flow and processing in nervous system. Neuroinformatics is devoted to the development of neuroscience data and knowledge bases together with computational models and analytical tools for sharing, integration, and analysis of experimental data and advancement of theories about the nervous system function. In the INCF context, neuroinformatics refers to scientific information about primary experimental data, ontology, metadata, analytical tools, and computational models of the nervous system. The primary data includes experiments and experimental conditions concerning the genomic, molecular, structural, cellular, networks, systems and behavioural level, in all species and preparations in both the normal and disordered states.
Neuroinformatics fosters collaborative research—an important fact that facilitates the field's interest in studying the multi-level complexity of the brain.
There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be applied:
- the development of tools and databases for management and sharing of neuroscience data at all levels of analysis,
- the development of tools for analyzing and modeling neuroscience data,
- the development of computational models of the nervous system and neural processes.
Society for Neuroscience Brain Information Group
On the foundation of all of these activities, Huda Akil, the 2003 President of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) established the Brain Information Group (BIG) to evaluate the importance of neuroinformatics to neuroscience and specifically to the SfN. Following the report from BIG, SfN also established a neuroinformatics committee.