Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills

Preface

Computers and the World Wide Web are rapidly and dramatically changing the face of biological research. These days, the term "paradigm shift" is used to describe everything from new business trends to new flavors of cola, but biological science is in the midst of a paradigm shift in the classical sense. Theoretical and computational biology have existed for decades on the "fringe" of biological science. But within just a few short years, the flood of new biological data produced by genomics efforts and, by necessity, the application of computers to the analysis of this genomic data, has begun to affect every aspect of the biological sciences. Research that used to start in the laboratory now starts at the computer, as scientists search databases for information that might suggest new hypotheses.

In the last two decades, both personal computers and supercomputers have become accessible to scientists across all disciplines. Personal computers have developed from expensive novelties with little real computing power into machines that are as powerful as the supercomputers of 10 years ago. Just as they've replaced the author's typewriter and the accountant's ledger, computers have taken their place in controlling and collecting data from lab equipment. They have the potential to completely replace laboratory notebooks and files as a means of storing data. The power of computer databases allows much easier access to stored data than nonelectronic forms of recording. Beyond their ...