Chapter 1 Basics for Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics has become a hot research topic in recent years, a hot topic in several disciplines that were not so closely linked with biology previously. A side evidence of this is the fact that the 2007 Graduate Summer School on Bioinformatics of China had received more than 800 applications from graduate students from all over the nation and from a wide collection of disciplines in biological sciences, mathematics and statistics, automation and electrical engineering, computer science and engineering, medical sciences, environmental sciences, and even social sciences. So what is bioinformatics? It is always challenging to define a new term, especially a term like bioinformatics that has many meanings. As an emerging discipline, it covers a lot of topics from the storage of DNA data and the mathematical modeling of biological sequences, to the analysis of possible mechanisms behind complex human diseases, to the understanding and modeling of the evolutionary history of life, etc. Another term that often goes together or close with bioinformatics is computational molecular biology, and also computational systems biology in recent years, or computational biology as a more general term. People sometimes use these terms to mean different things, but sometimes use them in exchangeable manners. In our personal understanding, computational biology is a broad term, which covers all efforts of scientific investigations on or related with biology that involve mathematics and computation. Computational molecular biology, on the other hand, concentrates on the molecular aspects of biology in computational biology, which therefore has more or less the same meaning with bioinformatics.