Am. J. Biomed. Sci. 2016, 8(3), 200-207; doi: 10.5099/aj160300200 © 2016 by NWPII. All rights reserved 200
American Journal of
Biomedical Sciences
ISSN: 1937-9080
nwpii.com/ajbms
Contribution of Clinical Biochemistry to Structural Bioinformatics
Heba M. Afify
Department of Bioelectronics Engineering, MTI University, Egypt.
Corresponding Author
Heba M. Afify
Department of Bioelectronics Engineering
MTI University
Egypt
Email: hebaaffify@yahoo.com
Received: 02 May 2016; | Revised: 11 July 2016; | Accepted: 19 July 2016
Abstract
Bioinformatics plays an important role in the study of human diseases with genomic data for drug
development and gene therapy. Its applicative arm is clinical biochemistry that focuses on the methodology
and interpretation of chemical tests performed to support diagnosis and treatment. Clinical biochemistry is
one of the most important parts of laboratory diagnostics tests together with laboratory hematology,
immunology, clinical serology and microbiology, clinical toxicology. It possesses the largest number of
diagnostic tests that help to understand pathogenesis and etiology of different pathological processes.
Clinical biochemistry is based on bioinformatics applications that have been used for tumor marker
measurements, stem cell tests, gene expression, and DNA damage repair. Bioinformatics field can be derived
from biochemistry. It means that biochemistry has emerged from bioinformatics applications. It is not an
overstatement to say that bioinformatics is what biochemistry is evolving to become a distinct guide for
quality control. This paper focuses on the point of contemporary clinical biochemistry that tends to support
bioinformatics researchers. Integration between biochemistry and bioinformatics would lead to an increase in
healthcare performance is thus of increasing importance in future research.
Keywords: Clinical Biochemistry, Bioinformatics, Laboratory Tests, Genomic Data.
1. Introduction
Since the middle of the 20
th
century,
bioinformatics was suggested to be applied for
clinical toxicology [1] and cancer [2]. One of the
early studies on expressed sequence tags in
human stem cells by bioinformatics was
performed in 1998 [3], where near 10000
sequences were analyzed. At the beginning of the
21
st
century, gene expression profiles in 60
human cancer cell lines used in a drug discovery
screen were evaluated by cDNA microarrays and
corrected with drug activity patterns by
combining bioinformatics and chemoinformatics
[4]. Clinical bioinformatics was initially proposed
to provide biological and medical information for
individualized healthcare, enable researchers to
search online biological databases and used