Is Bioinformatics related to Artificial Life?
Not really, but some relation exists. Both live in the area integrating biology and computers. In bioinformatics computer science is used to find specific insights in biology. In artificial life computers are used to find more general and conceptual insights about biology. In some fields of artificial life, the reverse is done: Mechanisms found in biology are used to solve some problems of computer science (e.g. genetic algorithms). • What is Blast Blast: Basic Local Alignment Search Tool. A sequence comparison algorithm, optimized for speed, used to search sequence databases for optimal local alignments to a query. Sequence alignments provide a powerful way to compare novel sequences with previously characterized genes. Both functional and evolutionary information can be inferred from well designed queries and alignments. BLAST provides a method for rapid searching of nucleotide and protein databases. Since the BLAST algorithm detects local as well as global alignments, regions of sim
