Bioinformatics deals with the various issues related to the biological data. It also covers the development of data analysis tools, modelling of biological macromolecules and their complexes, metabolic pathways, designing of new molecules such as drugs, peptide vaccines, proteins, etc. Gradually, Bioinformatics has evolved to deal with four related but still distinct problem areas, viz.
1. Handling and management of biological data,including its Organization, control, linkages, analysis and so forth.
2. Communication among people, projects and institutions engaged in the biological research and applications.
The communication may include e-mail, file transfer, remote login, computer conferencing, electronic bulletin boards, or establishment of web-based information resources.
3. Organization, access, search and retrieval of biological information, documents and literature.
4. Analysis and interpretation of the biological data through the computational approaches including visualization, mathematical modelling and development of algorithms for highly parallel processing of complex biological structures.
Bioinformatics may, therefore, be defined as a scientific discipline that encompasses all the aspects of biological information, viz. acquisition, processing, storage, distribution, analysis and interpretation, that combines the tools and techniques of mathematics, computer science and biology with the aim of understanding the biological significance of a variety of data.
