ABSTRACT

The application of BioIT computational hardware is an interdisciplinary field growing out of molecular genetics, mathematics, and computer science. This area is a result of the explosive growth of sequence databases and computational and digital communication capacity. Early sequencing projects generated demand for storage, retrieval, and comparison of newly generated sequence, while computational requirements focused on homology matching, sequence assembly, and taxonomy. The foundation for these analyses lay in information theory, statistical models, and pattern recognition algorithms. Methods of statistical testing, distributions, and models were required for an objective matching and quality assessment scoring. Performance issues arose from large-scale whole-genome sequencing and systems analysis, and database development became necessary for project development.