Bioinformatics: An Overview

Abstract

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary research area between biology and informatics, and has developed and grown from the need to extract and analyze genomic information obtained by the human genome project and other genome projects. This short article overviews major research topics in bioinformatics, which include sequence alignment, homology search, gene finding, inference of phylogenetic trees, genome wide association study, protein structure prediction, gene expression data analysis, and biological network analysis. Furthermore, this article overviews the history of bioinformatics studies in Japan and discusses the future directions.