Agree with some of the comments above. There is no "central dogma of bioinformatics" in same context as Francis Crick's statement for molecular biology. There are instead common methods or maybe even best practices, so I don't think the metaphor of "central dogma" here is apt..

The dogma is a mechanism for understanding the transfer of sequence information between DNA to mRNA, and mRNA to Protein in living organisms.  The classic view of the central dogma of biology states that "the coded genetic information hard-wired into DNA is transcribed into individual transportable cassettes, composed of messenger RNA (mRNA); each mRNA cassette contains the program for synthesis of a particular protein (or small number of proteins)."

The role of bioinformatics is to find out that much of the DNA that does not encode proteins is now known to encode various types of functional RNAs (like snRNA, miRNA, etc.)

Never heard about a central dogma in bioinformatics (other than the biological one mentioned by Maulik). In general terms, considering the hot topics by which the bioinformatics deals with, the bioinformatic central dogma maybe that the huge amount of short reads coming from NGS big data could be assembled in effective coded regions?

I do not believe there is a dogma to bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is nothing more than the application of Informatics Technology and Computational Sciences to questions of interest in the life sciences. Any central dogma of Bioinformatics would therefore be the same as whatever underlying Life Science discipline (population genetics, ecology, toxicology, oncology or any other branch of medicine, etc, etc) is using Bioinformatics approaches to understand their data.

Bioinformatics is not a scientific discipline in my mind, it is merely a descriptor (or one author used the term a "conceptualization") of an approach (or a sub-discipline at most) to managing and analyzing large complex data in biological research.

No one "does Bioinformatics" purely for its own sake. Bioinformatics only exists in the context of some underlying biological question of scientific interest.

I do not agree with Michael. With his perspective, the ontologies and the related semantic study could never be developed. Just as a "merely" example...

But, if there had not been a desire on the part of biologists to place their genomic data in functional biology context (not to mention a biological basis for presuming such associations would be informative), no one would have ever bothered to produce a single genomic ontology in the first place.

It's just hard to envision (to me at least) a single scenario where any bioinformatics effort, even large long running efforts like GenBank, or GO, would have ever come to being (let alone get funded) without a pre-existing biological foundation for the exercise.

Even reading the Gene Ontology Consortium's own statements of their origins and intent, the basis for the project from the very beginning was to meet a biological need. It was not driven by any informatics interest of its own, but instead to provide better tools for addressing biological data and biological questions.

Along with the biological central dogma that Maulik referenced, we could think about that same central dogma though the viewpoint of bioinformatics within the context of synthetic biology. We're familiar with the concept of DNA getting transcribed and RNA getting translated, but it isn't until we consider all those genetic sequences within the context of the other sequences they indirectly interact with (i.e., considering genomes rather than genes, transcriptomes rather than transcripts, and proteomes rather than proteins) that the overall biological patterns emerge. That's where the bioinformatics comes in. Analyzing all those sequences is an ideal job for computers. From that point, we can loop back to molecular biology using synthetic biology: we know about the code, so let's see what happens when that code runs.

Either that, or someone out there has already defined "the central dogma of bioinformatics." I certainly hope that hasn't happened. Dogma can be restrictive.

I doubt there is a Central Dogma for Bioinformatics.

Isn't the central dogma of any academic discipline that it deserves more funding than the others? :-)

Michael I do not agree once again. Ontologies does not regard only a biological issue.

Moreover, the specific case of GO has further improved the treatment of ontologies in general terms. As well, graph theory was not developed for biological needs but, in the meawhile, biological needs have stimulated the further development (that may be applied towards other disciplines).

In this context bioinformatics could be considered a scientific discipline. Moreover, a bioinformatician is more open-minded in establishing a crosstalk between really different scientific disciplines (eg socials vs bio), using the toolbox of IT.

Guess we can just agree to disagree then. Everything you mention to me merely strengths my own view. That bioinformatics is merely a technical description of a field that crosses many disciplines (mathematics, statistics, biology, computer science, etc), but by itself belongs to none.

Cool, replacing the word "Bioinformatics" with "Molecular Biology" sounds in the same way! Let's play with other disciplines...

"Let's play with other disciplines..."

No, as I said, I'll agree to disagree. I've said my piece, I stand by it, but any further discussion of these sorts of things just proves pointless and gets silly very quickly, so I'm done here.

But if Bioinformatics is a scientific discipline, I'd love to hear what specific branch of scientific knowledge is unique to bioinformatics?

Just to explore another field of interest (more distant from bioinfomatics in omic context). If we consider computational chemistry as a branch of bioinformatics, the parametrization of foce fields or QM-MM methods are some example of knowledge domain of bioinformatics.

Otherwise one can compute QM-MM with a paper and a pencil, but I doubt it is really performing.

The recent Nobel Prizes for Chemistry (2013) could be cosidered as a gold example of what a bioinformatician can do, other than merely parsing biological data.

Well I am agree with what @Maulik Rachh explain. And in my point of view Bioinformatics also include an another aspect of protein to function in molecular biology central dogma. So Central Dogma of Bioinformatics is :-

"genome is transcribed into the transcriptome and translated into proteome". Few intresting article on this:-

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=30121&seqNum=2

http://circgenetics.ahajournals.org/content/4/5/576.full

P.S : Bioinformatics is a well defined discipline.

Agree with some of the comments above. There is no "central dogma of bioinformatics" in same context as Francis Crick's statement for molecular biology. There are instead common methods or maybe even best practices, so I don't think the metaphor of "central dogma" here is apt..

Perhaps the metaphor of "central dogma" could be applied in the data workflow processing. But the methods in bioinformatics offer so several alternatives that the word "dogma" sounds inappropriate. If we were to use a metaphor "Good Bioinformatics Practices" sounds better for me.

In summary, it's only a semantic matter that I don't think it receives a uniform agreement.

Trying to get a dogma for Bioinformatics: Data ->DataBases->Computational analysis

Data input->Databases->Computational data analysis->Transformed data output

Genetic info-->Genetic structural db -->genetic functional Analysis--> Result (eg.Drug)

Generally, Central dogma of bioinformatics is In silico Expt.

I would like to give a crack on this one.

Around year 2000, I proposed a "definition" for bioinformatics. Rather from a tool/utility point of view, I would like to define bioinformatics as "theoretical studies in informatics with application to life". Like mathematics to physics, so should informatics to biology.

Informatics as a science would contain two branches at the moment: the study of the code of life (bioinformatics) and the current software packages linked to computer (mechano-informatics, code for computers, and intelligent devices and machines).

From this angle, the "Central Dogma of Bioinformatics" would be: the study of a code (our genetic code), its lexicon (all the genes and its regulators), and its grammatical rules (cascade of regulations); and of course, how it evolves over time. Essentially, we are studying a "live language", which are similar to the evolution of computer programming languages. Once we understand this language, we would be able to decode all the programs (genomes) written in it.

Y. Tang, I will take part of your definition by using the term "bio" on my next point of view,

BioData input->DataBases->Computational BioData analysis->Transformed BioData output

It would be considered the creation of a life code, analysis and prediction of proteins expressions

There is no central dogma(principle) of bioinformatics. If anyone wants one, they can concoct one, but will it really be a universal rule? I doubt it. If you define it as informatics use in biology, then its just a definition, not a dogma.