Bioinformatics Overview

Bioinformatics is the application of information technology to the field of molecular biology. Its primary use since the late 1980's has been in genomics and genetics, particularly in those areas of genomics involving large-scale DNA sequencing. Bioinformatics now entails the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques, and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data.

The primary goal of bioinformatics is to increase our understanding of biological processes. What sets it apart from other approaches, however, is its focus on developing and applying computationally intensive techniques (e.g. pattern recognition, data mining, machine learning algorithms, and visualization) to achieve this goal.
Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions, genome-wide association studies and the modelling of evolution. A full list of our services can be found here.