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Bioinformatics is a newly emerging interdisciplinary research area which may be defined as the interface between biological and computational sciences. Thus, the people working in this field in most cases either have a training in biology or computer science, and they learned about the other field by dealing with problems or using the tools of the other one. And although the term 'Bioinformatics' is not really well-defined, you could say that this scientific field deals with the computational management of all kinds of biological information, whether it may be about genes and their products, whole organisms or even ecological systems. Most of the bioinformatics work that is being done can be described as analyzing biological data, although a growing number of projects deal with the organization of biological information.
As a consequence of the large amount of data produced in the field of molecular biology, most of the current bioinformatics projects deal with structural and functional aspects of genes (Genomics) and proteins (Proteomics). Many of these projects are related to the Human Genome Project.
First, the data produced by the thousands of research teams all over the world are collected and organized in databases specialized for particular subjects. Well-known examples are: GDB, SWISS-PROT, GenBank, and PDB. The latter - for example - deals with three-dimensionaal structures of biological molecules. In the next step, computational tools are needed to analyse the collected data in the most efficient manner. For example, many bioinformaticists are working on the prediction of the biological functions of genes and proteins (or parts of them) based on structural data.
In recent years, many new databases storing biological information have appeared. But this has not only postive effects: now a days many scientists complain that it gets increasingly difficult to find useful information in the resulting 'data labyrith'. This may largely be due to the fact that the information gets more and more scattered over an increasing number of heterogeneous resources. To ameliorate this situation, bioinformticists are developing computational tools that integrate the scattered information in new types of web resources. The principal idea is that these databases should enable the scientific user to get a quick idea about the current knowledge that has been gathered about a particular subject/object.