Bioinformatics of Nuclear Receptors

Bioinformatics is a scientific discipline that is still being defined. To some, it is the development of new computer programs that use statistics to discern the relationships between DNA and protein sequences. To others, it is the development and implementation of databases to store and provide access to the sequences themselves and to related biological information. Finally, for still others, it is the use of the tools generated by computer scientists to analyze and interpret the information present in biological sequence data. Since a description of the bioinformatic tools available to study nuclear receptors could easily fill an entire book, this chapter first focuses on how to mine information on steroid receptors from databases on the World Wide Web (WWW), then gives a few examples of how to analyze the structure of a nuclear receptor using some of the available tools. A companion WWW site has been created for this chapter, where readers can find more detailed information and links (http://nrr.georgetown.edu/bioinform/begin.html).