 Dear students, in this module I am going to talk about the applications of bioinformatics. It will be a series of two modules and this is the first one. To introduce you to the topic, what can bioinformatics be used for specifically? How can bioinformatics benefit science? How can it advance science in a way that is unique to bioinformatics? And also how can bioinformatics contribute to the society? So these are the questions that need to be asked if you want to understand where bioinformatics can be applied. So let's start. First of all, bioinformatics can be applied to genomics. Genomics essentially is an area within bioinformatics that talks about the gene sequencing, identification of various genes, their function, the relationship with each other, assembling the genome together and variations in the genomes as well. Once you have this information, then you may want to store them in databases as well. So there is a lot of genomic applications towards establishing databases of genomes. Additionally, once the genome is transcribed, the transcriptional data can also be created in genomics. So genomics is the first application for bioinformatics. Next, evolutionary studies. So evolutionary studies as they are called or phylogenetics help us to determine the relationship between various species in terms of evolution. You can construct trees of life by looking at the genome sequence from various species or species that are similar but have evolved to look different as well. You can look at their evolutionary distances, that is, how different they have become over time. The third application of bioinformatics is in proteomics. In proteomics, you can study the sequences of proteins, how the protein sequence folds or bends to create a three-dimensional protein structure. Moreover, how these protein structures, they get the post-translational modifications on top towards functionalizing these proteins. Protein databases and structure databases are another very important application of proteomics in bioinformatics. You can also look at the protein-protein interactions, how the two proteins in question come together, what kind of functions do they perform after coming together and what is the effect of that function on the overall system. Lastly, you have the field of systems biology. In systems biology, you start with the interaction of the proteins. So how the proteins interact, how do they talk to each other, how do they co-perform different functions, what is the effect of one function on the other functions and other proteins. So this regulatory framework or network of protein interactions is studied in a field called systems biology. Systems biology is a rather recent application of bioinformatics. So you can have a dynamical evaluation of such protein interaction networks towards establishing the overall property of the protein network. Also, you can predict what kind of a behavior your protein interaction graph can have and therefore predict disease or predict drug interactions with the network. In conclusion, there are lots of applications for bioinformatics. I just briefly touched on genomics, evolutionary studies, phylogenetics, proteomics and systems biology. But if you really go out and look for them in detail, you may find a lot of them. Some of them have been listed here for you. And these include genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, structural proteomics that is the structural biology, the drug design systems biology as well as personalized medicines. So this is the overall application scope of bioinformatics. And we'll look at some of the details in the next module.