History of Bioinformatics
The Modern bioinformatics is can be classified into two broad categories, Biological Science and computational Science. Here is the data of historical events for both biology and computer science.
Introduction:
The history of biology in general, B.C. and before the discovery of genetic inheritance by G. Mendel in 1865, is extremely sketch and inaccurate. This was the start of Bioinformatics history. Gregor Mendel. is known as the "Father of Genetics". He did experiment on the cross-fertilization of different colors of the same species. He carefully recorded the data and analyzed the data. Mendel illustrated that the inheritance of traits could be more easily explained if it was controlled by factors passed down from generation to generation.
The understanding of genetics has advanced remarkably in the last thirty years. In 1972, Paul berg made the first recombinant DNA molecule using ligase. In that same year, Stanley Cohen, Annie Chang and Herbert Boyer produced the first recombinant DNA organism. In 1973, two important things happened in the field of genomics. The advancement of computing in 1960-70s resulted in the basic methodology of bioinformatics. However, it is the 1990s when the INTERNET arrived when the full fledged bioinformatics field was born.
Here are some of the major events in bioinformatics over the last several decades. The events listed in the list occurred long before the term, "bioinformatics", was coined.
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BioInformatics Events |
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| 1665 | Robert Hooke published Micrographia, described the cellular structure of cork. He also described microscopic examinations of fossilized plants and animals, comparing their microscopic structure to that of the living organisms they resembled. He argued for an organic origin of fossils, and suggested a plausible mechanism for their formation. |
| 1683 | Antoni van Leeuwenhoek discovered bacteria. |
| 1686 | John Ray, John Ray's in his book "Historia Plantarum" catalogued and described 18,600 kinds of plants. His book gave the first definition of species based upon common descent. |
| 1843 | Richard Owen elaborated the distinction of homology and analogy. |
| 1864 | Ernst Haeckel (Häckel) outlined the essential elements of modern zoological classification. |
| 1865 | Gregory Mendel (1823-1884), Austria, established the theory of genetic inheritance. |
| 1902 | The chromosome theory of heredity is proposed by Sutton and Boveri, working independently. |
| 1962 | Pauling's theory of molecular evolution |
| 1905 | The word "genetics" is coined by William Bateson. |
| 1913 | First ever linkage map created by Columbia undergraduate Alfred Sturtevant (working with T.H. Morgan). |
| 1930 | Tiselius, Uppsala University, Sweden, A new technique, electrophoresis, is introduced by Tiselius for separating proteins in solution. "The moving-boundary method of studying the electrophoresis of proteins" (published in Nova Acta Regiae Societatis Scientiarum Upsaliensis, Ser. IV, Vol. 7, No. 4) |
| 1946 | Genetic material can be transferred laterally between bacterial cells, as shown by Lederberg and Tatum. |
| 1952 | Alfred Day Hershey and Martha Chase proved that the DNA alone carries genetic information. This was proved on the basis of their bacteriophage research. |
| 1961 | Sidney Brenner, François Jacob, Matthew Meselson, identify messenger RNA, |
| 1965 | Margaret Dayhoff's Atlas of Protein Sequences |
| 1970 | Needleman-Wunsch algorithm |
| 1977 | DNA sequencing and software to analyze it (Staden) |
| 1981 | Smith-Waterman algorithm developed |
| 1981 | The concept of a sequence motif (Doolittle) |
| 1982 | GenBank Release 3 made public |
| 1982 | Phage lambda genome sequenced |
| 1983 | Sequence database searching algorithm (Wilbur-Lipman) |
| 1985 | FASTP/FASTN: fast sequence similarity searching |
| 1988 | National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) created at NIH/NLM |
| 1988 | EMBnet network for database distribution |
| 1990 | BLAST: fast sequence similarity searching |
| 1991 | EST: expressed sequence tag sequencing |
| 1993 | Sanger Centre, Hinxton, UK |
| 1994 | EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, UK |
| 1995 | First bacterial genomes completely sequenced |
| 1996 | Yeast genome completely sequenced |
| 1997 | PSI-BLAST |
| 1998 | Worm (multicellular) genome completely sequenced |
| 1999 | Fly genome completely sequenced |
| 2000 | Jeong H, Tombor B, Albert R, Oltvai ZN, Barabasi AL. The large-scale organization of metabolic networks. Nature 2000 Oct 5;407(6804):651-4, PubMed |
| 2000 | The genome for Pseudomonas aeruginosa (6.3 Mbp) is published. |
| 2000 | The A. thaliana genome (100 Mb) is secquenced. |
| 2001 | The human genome (3 Giga base pairs) is published. |