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Professor, Head of Centre, dr.phil, Ph.D. Søren Brunak DTU Systems Biology Center for Biological Sequence Analysis
One of the most fascinating things about bioinformatics is how the computer can be used to understand biological mechanisms.
In reality, our bioinformatics work is quite practical. One example of this is that we would like
to find out whether a cell discards a protein or whether the protein remains in the cell.
We can either design an experiment to determine this, or take the protein’s amino-acid sequence
and enter this into a software program and then try to train the software to recognize the difference.
We use this knowledge to identify how biology works as a system.
Many diseases involve more than just one gene. In the case of cancer or diabetes, for instance,
many genes affect the development of the diseases and have to be considered when developing a treatment for them.
So in reality, in these instances, we need to use this type of knowledge to treat what we call “network diseases”.