Computer Applications and Biostatistics

Computer application in biology is a complex blend of two distinct scientific disciplines – computer technology and life science. The field of biology is invariably depended on statistics too giving rise to biostatistics. The amalgam of computer applications and biostatistics in combination with several scientific fields gave birth to an interdisciplinary field called bioinformatics, which reaches the biological predictions in an in silico way in combination with statistics. Advancement of computer technology has led a path for biological researches giant leap. Progress in the basic functionalities of a computer like store, process, retrieve and reuse, has led to well a synchronized interplay of biology, computing technology and statistics. Biological data is extensive and heterogeneous ranging from text based genome sequences, geometric and spatial information to patterns, large images and simulation. Such a magnitude of information has to be stored, processed, retrieved and reused using proper application software. Internet development, on the other side has catalyzed the interplay by transmission of information. Combination of biostatistics has also added and amplified the elemental aspects of the biological fields like genomics and proteomics, which basically generate enormous amounts of redundant data. Applying computer-intensive biostatistician methods has enabled to process the biological data into information.

A computer is an electronic device that can be programmed to carry out a set of arithmetic or logical operations automatically. It is used for almost all the general purpose operations in daily life, since it can perform a sequence of operations, solving more than one kind of problem persistently. Information technologies computational tools and approaches provide opportunities to understand biology in a better way. The information technology addresses several problems of biology like

a) How the biological information can be organized, stored, archived, shared and visualized.

b) How do bimolecular, cells, their populations and other complex biological systems behave under a variety of in vivo conditions?

c) How bimolecular and complex biological process synchronize with each other by mimicking the entire system using modelling and simulation techniques.

And in all the above stated problems, statistics also caters a lot to solve the biological problems and to design algorithms and biometric models, hence the field biostatistics emerges. Computer Applications in biology is known to be computational biology or bioinformatics, which in combination with biostatistics allows one to develop and expand their skills in data management, statistical analyses and representation of resulted data for real world practices. This chapter is focused for introductory concepts of computer, biostatistical theory and their collective application in biology.