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What is Bioinformatics?

Bioinformatics and Computational Molecular Biology are generally concerned with the use of computation and large, cross-species, organized databases of biological information to augment or leverage traditional laboratory-based biology. Bioinformatics has become critical in biology due to recent changes in our ability and determination to acquire massive biological data sets (for example through genomic-level sequencing, and through expression monitoring of multiple mRNAs and even proteins), and due to the ubiquitous (almost routine) successful biological insights that have come from the comparison of the already available sequence data. Quoting from the proposal to establish a UC Life Sciences Informatics Program:

The capabilities to acquire this information have become so powerful that the volume of new data generated in some studies is growing exponentially ... There is general agreement that significant new understanding of basic biology and biomedical concerns will come from analyzing the vast amounts of data being generated. So important has this domain become that it has acquired its own name - bioinformatics.

The most mature example of the power of bioinformatics is from the accumulation, curation, and use of DNA and protein sequence data, and we will first use this example to illustrate the paradigm and potential of bioinformatics.



 
next up previous
Next: Sequence-oriented bioinformatics as a Up: No Title Previous: Preamble, (November 1, 1999)
Dan Gusfield
1999-11-03