#IdeaPlus

evade the human
immune system, survive,
reproduce and then
jump to another human
due to its highly
infectious nature. The
virus is believed to
spread via respiratory
droplets and aerosols,
when an infected person
comes in close contact
with a healthy individual.
The virus causes mild to
severe symptoms in
humans including fever,
dry cough, respiratory
distress, pneumonia etc.
and may result in death.
In the absence of a
vaccine, scientists
worldwide immediately
started working by
collaborating and
sharing data so that the
process of development
of a vaccine can be
accelerated. Even if
many scientists are stuck
at their homes as their
laboratories have been
closed down due to the
disease outbreak, their
minds are not stuck and
therefore, they have
started working from
home, analyzing the
available data and
coming up with ideas
that can help us to fight
this deadly disease.
In this crisis,
Bioinformatics has come
out as one of the major
fields in analyzing data
and helping in the
development of drugs or
vaccines. Sequence
data is the ‘holy grail’ in
Bioinformatics.
Bioinformaticians use
computational tools or
write their programmes
to analyze biological
data and come up with
theories that can be
further tested in the
laboratory for validation.
In the presence of a
large amount of data,
scientists have to spend
a great amount on time
and money to get any
fruitful results. In this
scenario, Bioinformatics
can be used to analyze
the data, discard the
redundant ones, and
come up with a few
significant predictions
which can be tested in
the laboratory quickly.
This way, Bioinformatics
can reduce the
workload and
expenditure significantly,
which in turn helps us to
address a problem
quickly and efficiently.
Today Bioinformaticians
are closely working with
various drug/ vaccine
development teams to
find out a cure for Covid-
19.
To predict a drug against
Covid-19, the workflow
of a Bioinformatician can
be roughly divided into
five broad areas: (a)
retrieving nucleic acid
data from the primary
sequence databases,
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