Why quantitative geneticists should care about bioinformatics

摘要

Whether you regard it as a scientific discipline or a supporting technology, bioinformatics has gained enough status and recognition to dominate scientific journals, graduate programmes, careers and entire research institutions. Bioinformatics couldbe defined as 'the storage, retrieval and analysis of information about biological structure, sequence, or function' (Altman, 1998). This is a flexible definition: it relates to information about virtually any biological enquiry - from molecular biologyto ecology, and it includes computational biology - an area that sometimes defines itself separately. The term bioinformatics, however, is used most frequently in relation to molecular biology or genomic research. For example, the instructions to authors of the journal Bioinformatics state that it is 'a forum for the exchange of information in the fields of computational molecular biology and genome bioinformatics' and historical perspectives of bioinformatics refer exclusively to sequence analysis andother biomolecular research (Roberts, 2000; Trifonov, 2000).