What is Bioinformatics?

What Is Bioinformatics?

Bioinformatics aims to address biological questions and problems by using and/or developing computational tools. Large amounts of data are now being generated through various “omics” methods that can collect data from entire genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, and metabolomes. Bioinformatics tools are critical in mining these data and deriving meaningful, biologically relevant conclusions. Bioinformatics relies on a well-developed infrastructure for software, data storage, organization, and access. To provide for this, a number of biological databases exist for a variety of purposes. For example, databases currently exist that compile the massive data output from genome projects, pathogen sequences, gene families, and so forth.

Tools

A listing of available tools at Boyce Thompson Institute and elsewhere:

Web Portals

• iPlant
• Galaxy
• NCBI-BLAST

Databases

• SGN
• VIGS Tool
• Databases