Ab initio prediction: computational prediction based on first principles or using the most elementary information.

Accession number: unique number given to an entry in a biological database, which serves as a permanent identifier for the entry.

Agglomerative clustering: microarray data clustering method that begins by first clustering the two most similar data points and subsequently repeating the process to merge groups of data successively according to similarity until all groups of data are merged. This is in principle similar to the UPGMA phylogenetic approach.

Alternative splicing: mRNA splicing event that joins different exons from a single gene to form variable transcripts. This is one of the mechanisms of generating a large diversity of gene products in eukaryotes.

Bayesian analysis: statistical method using the Bayes theorem to describe conditional probabilities of an event. It makes inferences based on initial expectation and existing observations. Mathematically, it calculates the posterior probability (revised expectation) of two joint events (A and B) as the product of the prior probability of A event given the condition B (initial expectation) and conditional probability of B (observation) divided by the total probability of event A with and without the condition B. The method has wide applications in bioinformatics from sequence alignment and phylogenetic tree construction to microarray data analysis.

Bioinformatics: discipline of storing and analyzing biological data using computational techniques. More specifically, it is the analysis of the sequence, structure, and function of the biological macromolecules – DNA, RNA, and proteins – with the aid of computational tools that include computer hardware, software, and the Internet.

[…]