Bioinformatics and Computational Biology— What? Why? How?
A gentle introduction to bioinformatics and computational biology
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology have become buzzwords in today’s world of Science. A few decades ago, people saw biology and computer science as two entirely different fields. One would learn about living beings and their functions whereas the other would learn about computers and underlying theories. However, at present, there seems to be a mere separation between the two fields and these new fields have emerged as a combination of both Computer Science and Biology.
What is Bioinformatics?
bio + informatics = bioinformatics
According to Wikipedia,
Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combines biology, computer science, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret the biological data.
Various biological analyses result in exponential amounts of biological data and it becomes very hard to analyze them using manual means. This is where Computer…
