Tech Glossary
What is Bioinformatics?
Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of research that combines biology, computer science and statistics to analyze and interpret biological data. It is used to study and understand biological processes at the molecular level by analyzing large data sets generated from DNA sequencing, protein structures, and other biological experiments. Like Adobe Photoshop, there are many different programs and tools that offer similar functions to Bioinformatics. Examples of other bioinformatics programs include BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), ClustalW, and Galaxy. These tools are used to do sequence analysis, compare DNA sequences, predict protein structures and much more in the field of bioinformatics.