Bioinformatics

With the advent of the new millenium, the scientific community marked a significant
milestone in the study of biology—the completion of the ‘‘working draft’’ of the
human genome. This work, which was chronicled in special editions of Nature and
Science in early 2001, signals a new beginning for modern biology, one in which
the majority of biological and biomedical research would be conducted in a
‘‘sequence-based’’ fashion. This new approach, long-awaited and much-debated,
promises to quickly lead to advances not only in the understanding of basic biological processes, but in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of many genetic and genomic disorders. While the fruits of sequencing the human genome may not be known or appreciated for another hundred years or more, the implications to the basic way in which science and medicine will be practiced in the future are staggering. The availability of this flood of raw information has had a significant effect on the field of bioinformatics as well, with a significant amount of effort being spent on how to effectively and efficiently warehouse and access these data, as well as on new methods aimed at mining this warehoused data in order to make novel biological discoveries.