Abstract

To face up to the threat of emerging infectious disease, one of the major challenge is to understand the molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis, host immunity, environmental adaptation in pathogens and drug resistance. The objective is to facilitate the development of therapeutics, diagnostics and vaccine to combat the diseases. With the recent advances in high-throughout experimental technologies, bioinformatics has an essential role in deciphering the vast amount of data generated and in organizing information gathered from traditional biology. Applied to the study of infectious diseases, bioinformatics permits a gene survey of related biological sequences, which consists of molecular characterization, structure prediction, phylogenetic analysis and regulatory motif prediction. Bioinformatics has also become an integral part of the investigation of the biological complexity of host-pathogen interactions. For example, the increasing number of genome sequences available in public databases, produced by novel sequencing technologies not only enhances studies of biodiversity and molecular epidemiology but also allows to explore the dynamic processes of co-evolution in host-pathogen systems. During the last decade, a variety of other experimental systems have been developed allowing bioinformatics analysis at the genome scale giving insights into host responses against pathogens such as microarrays for transcriptional  or protein expression profiling, genetic screening systems like the yeast-two-hybrid system used to identify pairwise protein interactions and novel mass spectrometry approaches. The integration of system-wide approaches, including transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics and high- throughput techniques, increases understanding of the fundamental mechanisms leading to the development of innovative strategies to deal effectively against infectious diseases.