From data-heaps to organized data-networks: Bioinformatics and Systems Biology

 

The impressive amount of information provided by genome sequencing projects cannot be processed without informatics tools provided by bioinformatics. This new discipline constitutes a general approach to all life sciences that makes it possible to study problems previously inaccessible to systematic research. Reading genetic information requires language-like models as well as models of the underlying world, i.e. the cell and its molecular components. Bioinformatics today uses language-based, structural as well as network-models for organizing and interpreting data in complex, interlinked databases. The greatest challenge is to integrate these data into efficient structures that on the one hand, allow querying over the Internet while on the other are suitable for studying system-wide behaviour. With the advent of integrated Internet resources, science has made a definitive step towards leaving the Guttenberg galaxy of printed text.

About the lecturer