Bioinformatics Challenges Facing Medical Research Professionals and the Tools to Face Them

Abstract

In 1998 the Hospital for Sick Children (HSC) created the Bioinformatics Centre with the mission to provide the infrastructure to researchers to effectively sift through the enormous amount of publicly available scientific data. With the data explosion facing medical research professionals, a strong need exists to employ informatics as an important tool to turn data into new scientific findings. The centre hostsnumerous commercial and public tools for the analysis of DNA and protein information as well as a consulting service through which researchers can discuss their problems with trained bioinformaticians. Notably, the centre has assumed operation of the GDB Human Genome Data Base. GDB is the international repository of human gene mapping information and is central to the activities of the human genome project. The transfer of GDB from one site to another has showcased important issues in biological database maintenance. The lack of clear documentation, poor coding standards, and questionable design decisions have created a fragileentity with an important role in the human genome project. Although the importance of a database such as GDB is clear to most health researchers, the growth of “boutique” databases showcasing particular subsets of biological data are becoming increasingly important. To merely collect these databases with a senseless attempt at integration is not a solution to the problem of biological data management. The employing of heterogeneous database integration tools and the computational power to quickly sift through massive amounts of data will be key effective scientific data management in the next millennium.