Bioinformatics

bioinformatics, a hybrid science that links biological data with techniques for information storage, distribution, and analysis to support multiple areas of scientific research, including biomedicine. Bioinformatics is fed by high-throughput data-generating experiments, including genomic sequence determinations and measurements of gene expression patterns. Database projects curate and annotate the data and then distribute it via the World Wide Web. Mining these data leads to scientific discoveries and to the identification of new clinical applications. In the field of medicine in particular, a number of important applications for bioinformatics have been discovered. For example, it is used to identify correlations between gene sequences and diseases, to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, to aid in the design of novel drugs, and to tailor treatments to individual patients based on their DNA sequences (pharmacogenomics).