The Emerging Landscape of Bioinformatics Software

The nature of biological data The life sciences literature presents biological results based on carefully collected, analyzed, and vetted data that researchers can use with high confidence. Everyday bioinformatics, however, deals with raw data collected from recently completed experiments in the form of images, charts, or numbers and with sequence data collected from a wide variety of online databases. We should regard such data with some skepticism. Any significant collection of raw experimental data includes experimental errors—systematic or random. Obtaining statistically meaningful data requires careful experimental design and replication of results. On the other hand, experiments are expensive in terms of professional labor, reagents, equipment, and time. As a consequence, biological data is always incomplete. Fusing computing and biology expertise, bioinformatics software provides a powerful tool for organizing and mining the vast amounts of data genetics researchers are accumulating.