Recently, a subtle but pretty weird idea waving in my mind, that is, there seems some kind of “peripheral” knowledge exerts a quite important role in bioinformatics paper. Generally thinking, mathematical reasoning and deduction are the essential part of a paper, then, base on this concrete and stable reasoning or deduction, we could further conduct a sensible study. Anyway, I found some bioinformatics papers present uncertain foundation in the background section, such as the assumption and putative axiom. All the work of the paper base on these uncertain foundation which have not been proved or predicated true yet. Among these uncertain foundation, putative axioms perhaps show some logic fundamental, whereas the assumptions are just intuitively conceived.
This paper (about disease and gene) bases on the assumption that
mutations in different members of a protein complex lead to comparable phenotypes.
Probably most of the readers didn`t know this assumption until they read this paper. They are just informed by the declaration in paper that if these “peripheral” knowledge is right, then the fantastic effectiveness of all their methods will be wonderfully viable as well.
Needless to say, biosystem is delicate and complicated to be modeling, to throughly understand the principle of organism, we need a lot work to do. Maybe that is the reason why the cutting edge of bioinformatics needs to envision more viabilities. To this point, i guess the summary or review of bioinformatics specifically focused on this “peripheral” knowledge is in great need.