Manufactured nanobiomaterials exploit the unusual properties of nanomaterials to develop new forms of intervention within biological systems. As a science field, nanobiotechnology focuses on the design, synthesis, characterization and application of nanomaterials and nanodevices to understand and resolve biological and biomedical problems. The success of nanobiotechnology hinges on our ability to characterize, predict, and control the biological properties of nanobiomaterials. Nanoinformatics is a collection of multi-disciplinary approaches used to catalog, correlate, and model nanomaterial properties.
Nanobioinformatics studies are complex because they must simultaneously deal with the large dispersion of chemical formulations of nanobiomaterials (ranging from polymer to metal oxide particles); the lack of a common language across contributing disciplines; and the lack of a low level language that can be used across nanoparticles. We could argue that, in lieu of a sequence space, similar to that available to bioinformatics studies of peptides and nucleotide sequences, we could build a structure based annotation and analysis of nanobioparticles that could help us cross-analyze their properties.
Computer characterization of nanobioparticles is of key importance to build a structure-based nanoinformatics infrastructure. The Collaboratory for Structural Nanobiology (CSN http://nanobiology.utalca.cl or http://nanobiology.ncifcrf.gov) is our attempt to build a nanobioinformatics service dedicated to the collection, curation, and correlation of structural, physiochemical, biological, and biomedical data. We have used CSN to explore nanobioparticle data storage, retrieval and analysis in the context of nanobiological studies. On this site you can find downloadable nanopdb files and related research data, as well as resources for visualizing different nanoparticles, such as dendrimers, nanotubes and some metallic particles.