Treffer: Introduction to Bioinformatics and Java.

This Chapter provides a brief introduction to The Human genome Project, perhaps the single most important event in the history of medicine after the elucidation of the double-helix structure of the DNA and to the fields of Bioinformatics, Genomics and Proteomics. While computing technology and software have played a fundamental role in the advancements that medical research has made in the last few decades, they have also led to problems in data quality. The silo approach that the biomedical research enterprise has taken has led to isolation of critical scientific expertise and knowledge, depriving patients of the benefits of modern science. To correct these issues, and to bring speedier benefits to individuals with cancer, the NCI in partnership with its Center for Bioinformatics and a number of Cancer Centers across the country launched the caBIG ™ program with the aim of providing scientists with the infrastructure and resources to better control, share, assimilate and integrate data from disparate sources. The chapter also provides an overview of the role that the J2EE platform has played in biomedical research especially with the advent of the Internet age and the availability of the WWW as a catalytic medium for the sharing of resources across space. We also provided examples of a few software applications that demonstrate the power of the J2EE platform In the next Chapter, we will build on the understanding we have gained so far of the state of and the challenges faced by the biomedical enterprise and begin the exercise of understanding how software is built using the J2EE platform. We will illustrate this by building an application using the Java Swing library to run biological sequence searches using the NCBI BLAST engine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]