Bioinformatics or Computational biology is the study of large amounts of biological information. Mostly, it focuses on molecules like DNA. It is done mostly with the help of computers. Bioinformatics focuses more on the engineering side and the creation of tools that work with biological data to solve problems. It is the application of data analysis or computational interpretation of biological problems. And computational biology is about studying biology using computational techniques, which further the understanding of science. It is the development of algorithms or tools that would enable the solving of these problems.
Foundation
Bioinformatics goal is to build useful tools that work on biological data. It is about engineering. As species of living things change over time, the DNA contained in their cells change, from evolution. If we can extract the information from living things today, and compare them to each other, we can see which living things are most closely related, much like comparing two editions of a book, the most similar can be thought to be the most closely related in time. By doing this, biologists can construct family trees or phylogenies. By stitching together all the trees, a grand tree connecting all living things can be made, this is called the “Tree of Life”.
The process
Bioinformatics is computational analysis and interpretation of data, however, computational Biology deals with the development of algorithms used to analyze the data. Anything a cell could possibly want is stored in its DNA. When a cell wants to build a protein, it finds the appropriate piece of DNA, makes a copy of it (called RNA) and uses the instructions in the copy to make the protein.
Computational biology and bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that develops and applies computational methods to analyze large collections of biological data, such as genetic sequences, to make new predictions or discover new biology. The principle of bioinformatics is that these molecules can be studied by using computers to analyze the DNA, RNA, and amino acid sequences from which they are created. Because there are so many different molecules, the best way we have of understanding how the entire system works is to use bioinformatics.
