Bioinformatics

What is bioinformatics?
What do you call someone who does bioinformatics?

[A microarray]

What is bioinformatics?

Bioinformatics is the art of understanding biological information. If we're lucky, bioinformatics will someday become a science. Right now, it uses ideas from mathematics, statistics, and computer science (1) to deal with a veritable plethora (2) of data arising primarily from the field of molecular biology.

Classical bioinformatics

Classical bioinformatics (great phrase, isn't it? for a field that's younger than my daughter) deals with sequence data from DNA, RNA, or proteins. Here are some samples of the kinds of questions it tries to answer:

I've just sequenced a new gene. What knowns genes is this sequence similar to?
I've just sequenced some long random glob of DNA. Which parts of this sequence are likely to encode for genes? Which parts are likely to be exons? Which parts are random junk?
I believe that this DNA sequence encodes a protein. From the resulting sequence of amino acids, what can I say about the likely function of this protein? What shape is the protein likely to take?

Gene Expression

More recently, bioinformatics has found itself confronting a new set of problems as a consequence of biological techniques that can measure the expressions levels of thousands of genes simultaneously. Two such techniques are curently being used at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center: microarrays and SAGE. These technologies play complementary roles.

Microarrays are an example of a closed system: you place thousands of spots containing cDNA from known genes on a glass slide or a nylon filter, hybridize it with labelled RNA from a sample, and measure the gene expression levels. (The picture at the top of this page is a portion of a microarray using two-color fluorescence on a glass slide.)

SAGE, on the other hand, is an open system. You take small snippets of many mRNA molecules from a sample, and sequence them to see how frequently each snippet occurs.

What the two techniques have in common is an ability to generate huge quantities of data in a short period of time, requiring classical informatics techniques to store and curate the data, and brand-new statistical and mathematical methods to extract meaningful biological information from the data.

Proteomics

And, even more recently than miroarrays and SAGE, proteomics is generating greater quantities of data that may be even harder to interpret.

What do you call someone who studies bioinformatics?

This may be a harder question than the first one. The obvious choice is a bioinformatician, which I can spell but am never certain how to pronounce. Other options aren't much better:

informatist ?
bioinformatist ?
bioinformer ?

Part of the problem is that "biomathematician" and "biostatistician" and "mathematical biologist" already mean something else. In some people's minds, a "bioinformatician" is someone who combines computer science with biology in the same way that biostatistician combines statistics with biology. If that's the case, perhaps the real goal should be the development of computational biologists, which would at least put the emphasis on using the field to do important work in biology.

Note 1: Is "computer science" also an art that would like to develop into a science? Mathematics, of course, in spite of being the queen of the sciences, is definitely an art.

Note 2: All "plethoras" are "veritable", of course.

[Work] [Bioinformatics] [Mathematics] [Life]

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Disclaimer: This page was last updated on 12 October 2002. It is entirely possible that the information contained herein no longer has any connection with reality (assuming it ever did). Feel free to send constructive comments or inane criticisms to:

Kevin Coombes
Departments of Biostatistics and Biomathematics
University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Houston, TX 77030