Omics, Bioinformatics, and Infectious Disease Research

Bioinformatics is basically the study of informatic processes in biotic systems. Actually what constitutes bioinformatics is not entirely clear and arguably varies depending on who tries to define it. This chapter discusses the considerable progress in infectious diseases research that has been made in recent years using various “omics” case studies. Bioinformatics is tasked with making sense of it, mining it, storing it, disseminating it, and ensuring valid biological conclusions can be drawn from it. This chapter discusses the current state of play of bioinformatics related to genomics and transcriptomics, briefs metagenomics that finds use in infectious disease research as well as the random sequencing of genomes from a variety of organisms. This chapter explains the various possibilities of pan-genome, transcriptional reshaping and also enormous progress of proteomics study. Bioinformatic algorithms and tools are crucial tools in analyzing the data. The chapter also attempts to provide some details on the various problems and solution in bioinformatics that current-day scientists face while concentrating on second-generation sequencing strategies.