What is Bioinformatics?

[Guest obbecman]

Hi all, I'm a member of the editorial team of OBBeC.Com magazine (http://www.obbec.com) which covers the subject of life science computing and healthcare informatics. I came accross lots of debates about the exact meaning of Bioinformatics and the differences between bioinformatics, computational biology, biocomputing ...etc.

 

Just for my personal interest, I would like to know what do you believe bioinformatics is? is there any difference between bioinformatics and the other concepts I mentioned above?

 

My personal opinion is that, as a concept, bioinformatics is simply integrating computational technologies with life science applications, which is not a straight forward task as it sounds.

 

Thus, there is no real difference between bioinformatics and the other "Names" of this concept. However, the word bioinformatics is commonly associated with molecular biology and genetics with the utilisation of database-driven tools, which is just a small part of the whole picture. This has resulted in the emergence of the other simlar concepts, and it seems to me that this has started to confuse many people. That's purely my own opinion