What is bioinformatics?

Bioinformatics is a modern scientific discipline which wants to apply mathematical model to biology in particular to cellular and molecular biology and biochemistry. Even if in the last years important projects, such as the Genome or the Proteome project, have required a large use of bioinformatic tools, a lot of work will be done to exactly correlate biological results to in silico models. Bioinformatics is useful to create statistical model to explain biological experiments and identify significant trends. Moreover, it’s possible to generate models to compare sequences of DNA, RNA and proteins to identify relevant sequences for the evolution or for biomolecule functions. These tools are usually available for free in several websites – Expasy for instance-, are user friendly and are currently used by all scientists, even without special skills in bioinformatics. By contrast, more complex processes, like creating network with data, require great competences on biology, biochemistry, mathematics and bioinformatics. For this reason, the crucial point to obtain useful results from bioinformatics is to have a tight collaboration with other professionals in order to evaluate all the results in the right way. One big challenge of bioinformatics is to try to rationalize the biological system, overcoming the unexplainable phenomena which are often encountered.