General description |
Knowledge management in biology is the field of bioinformatics, and includes both the formalization of the information obtained and its organization in appropriate databases, the extraction of relationships between the scattered information, the modeling of biological processes and the generation of hypotheses to support new experimental approaches. From a technical standpoint, bioinformatics using computational methods (the proper method development in this area is often called computational biology) and receives contributions from mathematics, physics and computer engineering. However, from the point of view of the objectives, bioinformatics is a branch of biology, as they can be biochemistry or microbiology. This interdisciplinary nature of bioinformatics lies both its strength and its weakness: first, the application of ideas brought from other fields consistently produces spectacular advances; but on the other hand, it is difficult to develop appropriate training programs.
To realize the importance of bioinformatics in modern biology, it may enough to say that the method most cited publications in this area is Blast, a computational method that searches and identifies sequences of proteins and nucleic acids in databases: ie more technical operations is performed by computational biologists, and no experimental. In fact, the interpretation of any experiment in biology requires complex, almost inevitably, bioinformatic analysis, which is especially obvious in massive experiments. |