What is Bioinformatics
The term informatics is widely used in both health care and computer science.
computer specialists use the term informatics for computer hardware, software, and information theory
- medical informatics includes all data management in a hospital from patient records, billing, images, to medical literature etc.
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Bioinformatics is the use of computers for the acquisition, management, and analysis of biological information.
- it incorporates elements of molecular biology, computational biology, database computing, and the Internet
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The key element of the definition is information management
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Bioinformatics deals with any type of data that is of interest to biologists
- DNA and protein sequences
- Gene expression (microarray)
- articles from the literature and databases of citations
- images
- raw data collected from any type of field or laboratory experiment
- software
- Each type of data can exist in many incompatible computer formats.
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The analysis of DNA sequence data has come to dominate the field of bioinformatics,
but the term can be applied to any type of biological data that can be recorded as numbers or images and handled by computers
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Biologists require simple, powerful, and intuitive tools to manipulate data in infinte and unpredictable combinations
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bioinformatics is clearly a multi-disciplinary field including:
- computer systems management
- networking, database design
- computer programming
- molecular biology
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Few scientists describe themselves as specialists in bioinformatics, and it is difficult to
train people to specialize in this field.
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Different skills are required to use computer tools to analyze data
vs. the design of those tools.
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It is yet another thing to create the mathematical algorithms used to build the tools.
Using Computers for Molecular Biology
Stuart M. Brown, Ph.D., RCR, NYU Medical Center
Comments to: browns02@mcrcr.med.nyu.edu