So this is going to be really short, and I just want to preview to you what genomics means and what the different factions of study are. So genomics is the study of genomes in their entirety. That's the part that codes for genes, the parts that are regulatory, the telomeres, the centromeres, literally anything that has genetic material in it, and DNA that's organized in the chromosome, that is Genomes. And so the study of that is Genomics. There are 3 main classes, that sort of subdivide Genomics, and we'll talk about all of them individually.
The first is bioinformatics. This is the analysis of the information content of the genome. The genome isn't all information content. Right? There's a lot of stuff that doesn't code for anything or a lot of material like telomeres, for instance, that have no information in them that are just condensed pieces of DNA. But bioinformatics studies the information content. That's going to be genes, that's going to be regulatory sequences. So what activates, inactivates the gene, where do proteins bind to activate or inactivate? Where are the non-coding RNAs that have functions? The micro RNAs, siRNAs, where are all of these encoded? So bioinformatics studies the information of the genome.
Comparative genomics studies genomes of closely and distantly related species for the purpose of evolutionary studies. So we're comparing genomes of yeast and humans to figure out what's similar and what's not. We're comparing the genomes of two bacteria to figure out what's similar and what's different. The purpose of this is to understand how things evolved.
And then finally, you have functional genomics. The purpose of functional genomics is to determine the functions of genes and proteins. So we have certain genes, and we may identify them or may identify a mutation. But we need to know what that gene does, so what protein it makes, and where that protein is expressed in the body, at what time in development, or what age, or under what conditions is that protein expressed, and what's the function of that protein? Does it help support the cell? Does it secrete something, a hormone, for instance, that could be used for proper development? There are so many different ways. So you're going to understand that genomics is really the study of huge amounts of data, whether that's comparing genomes, whether that's looking at the information content of genes, or whether it's trying to figure out what a gene and protein function is. All of these aspects really involve huge amounts of data, so it's a very common thing in genomics. And so, yeah. So with that, we're going to move forward and talk about each one of these individually. So let's move on.
