9.15 – Bioinformatics

This chapter provides a brief overview of biodiversity with emphases on natural products from marine microbial origin. To manage and analyze the vast and simultaneous information requires information manipulation and information technology such as database and visualization. Important data mining techniques and algorithms that are common in bioinformatics, either unsupervised or supervised, are reviewed in brief. A number of well-managed and well-accessed databases/data banks available in the world are then introduced. Finally, in a case study, some aspects of the protein modeling involved in the odorant receptor cascade of events have been presented.