Bioinformatics FAQ

What is Bioinformatics?

• Critical underpinning of the movement toward "largescale biology" (Searls)
  
• Computer analysis of large assemblages of biological information...
  
• A subset of the larger field of computational biology (with a closely related field called computational chemistry)
  
  

What are its advantages?

• Big picture views
  
• Automation saves time and money
  
• Automation provides for more systematic, rulesbased analyses
  
  

What are its disadvantages?

• Insight is hard to automate
  
• Biology is more complex than can be adequately modeled by currently available systems
  
• Individual errors are hard to catch and correct
  
  

What are the emerging fields in bioinformatics

• Data storage and retrieval, Database structures,Annotation
  
• Analysis of genomic/proteomic/other high-throughput information
  
• Evolutionary model building and phylogenetic analysis
  
• Architecture and content of genomes
  
• Complex systems analysis/genetic circuits
  
• Information content in DNA, RNA, protein sequence and structure
  
• Metabolic computing
  
• Data mining using machine learning tools, neural nets, AI
  
• Nucleic acid and protein sequence analysis