ISSN: 2041-6792

Clinical Investigation

Research Articles On Computational Biology

Computational biology is the science that answers the question “How can we learn and use models of biological systems constructed from experimental measurements?”  These models may describe what biological tasks are carried out by particular nucleic acid or peptide sequences, which gene (or genes) when expressed produce a particular phenotype or behavior, what sequence of changes in gene or protein expression or localization lead to a particular disease, and how changes in cell organization influence cell behavior.   This field is sometimes referred to as bioinformatics, but many scientists use the latter term to describe the field that answers the question “How can I efficiently store, annotate, search and compare information from biological measurements and observations?”  (This subject has been discussed previously by an early NIH task force report and by Raul Isea.) A number of factors contribute to the confusion between the terms, including the fact that one of the top journals in computational biology is entitled “Bioinformatics” and that in German for example, computer science is referred to as “informatik” and computational biology is referred to as “bioinformatik.”  Some also feel that bioinformatics emphasizes the information flow in biology.  In any case, the two fields are closely linked, since “bioinformatics” systems typically are needed to provide data to “computational biology” systems that create models, and the results of those models are often returned for storage in “bioinformatics” databases.    

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