Biology Fundamentals for Bioinformatics

This section is meant to cover the very basic concepts that must be grasped to be able to understand the science of bioinformatics. It thus is not intended as a substitute biology course that covers biology exhaustively. One could consider this as a crash course introduction for studying bioinformatics. Materials for further reading will be provided as we progress through the path.

The basic definition of a cell is that: it is the basic unit of life. Many organisms are unicellular, meaning a cell is itself an organism. Contrary to this, for higher species like animals and plants, an organism can contain several billions of cells. There are two types of cells ; Prokaryotic cell and Eukaryotic cell. Below are images showing the basic structure of a prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.

What is the Central Dogma?

The Central Dogma is the process by which instructions in the DNA are converted into a functional product. It explains how genetic information flows from DNA > RNA >Proteins. This was proposed by Francis Crick, a giant in the field of genomics.