Impacto de la Bioinformática en las ciencias biomédicas

The advances reached by the genetic engineering and the development of new information technologies during the last decade, conditioned the emergence of a discipline that has created indissoluble bonds between the Computer Sciences and the Biological Sciences: the Bioinformatics. The present work demonstrates the impact of the Bioinformatics in the Medical Sciences, through the bibliometric analysis of MEDLINE, the most important database of the biomedical environment at the present time. The main applications of this discipline in the registrations obtained in MEDLINE were directed to the data management in the laboratory, the automation of experiments, the assembling of contiguous sequences, the prediction of functional domains in gene sequences, the alignment of sequences, the searches in databases of structures, the structure determination and prediction of macro-molecules, the molecular evolution and the phylogenetic trees. The medical specialties mostly influenced by the Bioinformatics were the Medical Genetics, Clinical Biochemistry, Pharmacology, Neurosciences, Medical Statistic, Immunology, Physiology and Oncology.