英语翻译
Bioinformatics—A New Era
Today,most graduate students and postdocs would find it difficult to imagine a time when sequence databases and search tools were not a ubiquitous and accessible part of the research landscape.I'm not that old but,even during my first year of college,the only sequence "database" available was a thin book containing 65 tRNA from a few bacteriophages and viruses.The first mammalian mRNA sequence to be determined,rabbit β globin mRNA,made the cover of "Cell" in 1977,and papers describing the coding sequence,the 5'untranslated region and the 3'untranslated region merited three separate publications in the issue!Students entering graduate school at the time might still expect to receive a PhD for cloning and sequencing a single cDNA-now you can't get one for sequencing a million!
GenBank was not set up until 1982 and,during the early days,was distributed to university computing centers four times per year on magnetic tapes.By the time I needed to do my first homology,search in graduate school,GenBank contained a whopping 2427 sequences (compared with about 2532359 available today),most of which were typed in manually from journals (or from printed,hard-copy submissions) by GenBank curators.Luckily,against all odds,I got an informative "hit" with my very first query sequence and that experience profoundly altered the future direction of my career.
The term “bioinformatics” is a fairly recent invention,not appearing in the literature until around 1991 and then only in the context of the emergence of electronic publishing.I think that the current concept of bioinformatics was best described as the convergence of two technology revolutions,the explosive growth in biotechnology,paralleled by the explosive gowth in information technology.This is illustrated,in an uncanny way,by the fact that both the size of GenBank and the power of computers have been doubling at about the same race(every 18-24 months) for many years.
The term bioinformatics still carries with it enough hype to make investigating “biology with computers” seem like the cutting edge.However,some of my role models when I was a graduate student had been building databases,developing algorithms and making biological discoveries by sequence analysis since the 1960s,long before anyone thought to label this activity with a special term (if anything,it was called "molecular evolution") .Even a relatively new kid on the block,the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI),is cerebrating its 10th anniversary this year,having been written into existence by US Congressman Claude Pepper and President Ronald Reagan in 1988.So bioinformatics has,