THE APPLICATION OF BIOINFORMATICS IN THE MOLECULAR CHARACTERIZATION OF Bacillus licheniformis

Abstract

Bioinformatics is the application of information technology in biology and includes the processes of gathering, processing and analysing experimental results. Bioinformatics now entails the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques, and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data. Computers are necessary in microbiology because the manual comparison of multiple sequences has become unpractical. The research subject was the characterisation of the strain ST51 isolated from the thermal water well in Vranjska Banja, south eastern Serbia. Molecular characterisation of these three strains was performed by analysis of the tuf gene, which encodes the elongation factor Tu. The DNA sequences were compared to those deposited in GenBank. data bases using the BLAST program (https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?PROGRAM=blastn). The biochemical characterisation was performed using the API 50 CHB system (bioMerieux) and APIWEB TM software Ver. 4.1. The molecular characterisation of the strain ST51 proved the highest level of similarity to the strain Bacillus licheniformis marked as ATCC 14580 (99% identical). The biochemical characterization confirmed that the strain ST51 belongs to the species Bacillus licheniformis.Given that all the conducted analyses yielded a substantial number of data, they were processed and compared using biostatistics methods and tools in order to achieve the highest probability of resulted taxonomic classification. Modern research contributes to the analysis of a significant number of variables which is why considerably more statistical analyses are involved in their interpretation and presentation. Our results indicate that different methods are needed for proper determination and characterisation of isolates/strains. Regarding taxonomy, molecular methods are the most precise, while for physiological specificity biochemical methods are more reliable.