What is the contribution of bioinformatics to the field of molecular biology? As in all areas of science, the basic contribution of computers in biology and medicine is clear: speed of processing and mathematical precision. Such a conceptually easy task as aligning two amino acid sequences would be very tedious (and unthinkable to do at large scale) without the use of computers. Even more importantly, this processing speed has become an essential ally for researchers in front of the unbelivable accumulation of biological data in recent years.
With specially programmed computers we can cross data obtained independently and make hidden relationships between biological entities arise. New programs are developed continually in order to choose, integrate and visualise data, helping to quickly find genes related by sequence, function or expression, to explore metabolic pathways or to summarise the results of clinical assays. In brief, these programs help us establish new hypothesis and to further advance research. And this is a critical task because, otherwise, a lot of very valuable information would be submerged below the mountain of results that are being added daily to the databases.
Finally, bioinformatics can model in silico (inside the computer) complex aspects of the biological systems from more simple components. This is achieved by training the computer with real data and verifying its progress until the predictions obtain reasonably credible results. A classical example is the prediction of the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. The usefulness of the bioinformatics predictions is clear when an experimental test is too complex (or too expensive) to be done. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a further step that in recent years has revolutionise even more the power of computers for biological research and biomedicine among many other things.
Obviously, given the interrelationship between experimental biology and bioinformatics, the development of new experimental methodologies is a stimulation for the development of new bioinformatics systems. In parallel, the hypotheses constructed from bioinformatics analyses are an incentive for the development of new experiments. Therefore, it is expected that the synergy between both fields of research will become more important in the years to come.
The original article was written by Daniel Aguilar when he was at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB) .
