Computational gene discovery and human disease

Bioinformatics is now an essential tool in many aspects of human molecular genetics research. Methods for the prediction of gene structure are essential components in genomic sequencing projects and provide the key to deriving protein sequence and locating intron/exon junctions. Sequence comparison and database searching are the pre-eminent approaches for predicting the likely biochemical function of new genes, although sequence profiles derived from families of aligned sequences have advantages in the detection of remote sequence relationships. The use of sequence database analysis for large-scale comparative analysis of genome sequence data from model organisms is emerging as the most important recent development in the application of bioinformatics methods for characterizing candidate disease genes.