Who coined the term Bioinformatics?

Watson and Crick realized that DNA was made up of two chains of nucleotide pairs that encode the genetic information for all living things. Dayhoff initiated the first collection of protein sequences. This resulted in her publication of the Atlas of Protein Sequences and Structure. Published in 1965, this book provided a collection of all known protein sequences. The reference book was regularly updated and went through many editions. Today it is considered the founding text for bioinformatics. In 1971 Dayhoff launched the Protein Information Resource, the first on-line database system that could be accessed by telephone line. It was the first sequence database available for interrogation by remote computers. One of her major contributions to the computer programming of protein sequencing was her invention of a single-letter code for amino acids. These had been coded previously with three letters. Dayhoff’s new single-letter code greatly reduced the size of the data files needed to describe the sequence of amino acids in a protein. She also devised an amino acid similarity-scoring matrix. This was one of the first tools for database searching, comparing protein sequences and constructing evolutionary trees. Dayhoff died before bioinformatics was recognised as a distinct field, but her methods and tools are vital to the design of many of today’s databases and laid the foundation for scientists to research macromolecules and their structure and the setting up of the Human Genome Project. Her development of ’evolutionary trees’, based on correlations between proteins and living organisms, also helped establish that certain genes normally found in most body tissue cells are closely related to those found in many cancer cells. Frederick Sanger, (born August 13, 1918, Rendcombe, Gloucestershire, England—died November 19, 2013, Cambridge), English biochemist who was twice the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. He was awarded the prize in 1958 for his determination of the structure of the insulin molecule. He shared the prize (with Paul Berg and Walter Gilbert) in 1980 for his determination of base sequences in nucleic acids. Sanger was the fourth two-time recipient of the Nobel Prize. Paulien Hogeweg (born 1943) is a Dutch theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher studying biological systems as dynamic information processing systems at many interconnected levels. In 1970, together with Ben Hesper, she defined the term bioinformatics[2][3] as “the study of informatic processes in biotic systems“. Starting with asynchronous extensions of L-systems she pioneered agent-based modeling studying development of social structure in animal societies, using the opportunity based “ToDo“ principle where agents “do what there is to do“, and a “DoDom“ principle for dominance ranking, also known as the winner-loser effect. This type of research later became popular in artificial life. When the first biological sequence data became available (from the EMBL) she developed a tree based algorithm for multiple sequence alignment. which is now common practice in sequence alignment and phylogeny. At about the same time she pioneered folding algorithms for predicting RNA secondary structures.[8] RNA folding was also introduced to allow for a non-linear genotype to phenotype mapping to study evolution on complex fitness landscapes . The first phase-phase trajectory of a chaotic attractor in an ecological food-chain model of three differential equations appeared long before chaos became popular. She pioneered the use of cellular automata for studying spatial ecological and evolutionary processes and demonstrated that spatial pattern formation can revert evolutionary selection pressures. Extending the Cellular Potts model (CPM) to study morphogenesis and development she modeled the complete life cycle of Dictyostelium discoideum using simple rules for chemotaxis and differential adhesion. This CPM approach is now used for modeling in various areas of developmental biology, and the migration of immune cells in lymphoid tissues. Finally the CPM is used for EvoDevo research. In recent years, Hogeweg has continued to researcher on co-evolutionary dynamics and morphogenesis to expand on “adaptive genomics” to study the interface between gene regulation and evolution in cellular organisms. Also, her research is focused on evolvability at the level of genome organization and regulatory networks, and has shown RNA increase in complexity as the result of interactions of secondary structure and spatial pattern formation. #Bioinformatics #JDWatson #MargaretDayhoff #PauleinHogeweg #FrederickSanger