DOI: 10.1080/10915810590948325 Understanding Biology Through Bioinformatics

During the journey from the discovery of DNA to be the source of genetic information and elucidation of double-helical nature of DNA molecule to the assembly of human genome sequence and there after, bioinformatics has become an integral part of modern biology. Bioinformatics relies substantially on significant contribu-tions made by scientists in various fields, including but not limited to, linguistics, biology, mathematics, computer science, and statis-tics. There is an ever increasing amount of data to elucidate toxic mechanisms and/or adverse effects of xenobiotics in the field of tox-icogenomics. Annotation in combination with various bioinformat-ics analytical tools can play a crucial role in the understanding of genes and proteins, and can potentially help draw meaningful con-clusions from various data sources. This article attempts to present a simple overview of bioinformatics, and an effort is made to discuss annotation