ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we will briey introduce bioassays, mechanisms through which practitioners of bioinformatics collect much of their data. Being familiar with these bioassays will help the reader to understand the bioinformatics eld better. Some of the more important bioassays we will discuss are Southern blotting, uorescent in situ hybridization, the Sanger (dideoxy) method, and polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Finally, we will study the methods of analyzing protein structure and function as well as methods of studying gene expression and function.
