Genomics Glossary for Bioinformatics


a sequence of instructions/actions to solve some problem


the variety and variability of living things in the world or in a particular habitat or ecosystem








a unit of memory size




a unit of DNA that controls specific traits


all the DNA in an organism



omics datasets

informally refers to the data of some field of study in biology ending in -omics, such as genomics, proteomics or metabolomics; “omics” implies a large or genome-wide scale


creating a sequence of instructions/actions from a fixed set of allowed instructions/actions to solve a problem

programming language

a formal syntax to communicate instructions to a machine


a section of DNA where RNA polymerase can bind to initate transcription

reference genome

The entire genome sequence of the organism from which we collected our RNA samples

sequence motif



a sequence of one or more letters


the process in which information in a strand of DNA is decoded into a messenger RNA molecule