Many questions from life science come from the natural world/ in vivo – this can include any range of topics such as investigating the molecular causes of diseases, contrasting virulence of different pathogens or researching the origins of human evolution. To help visualize the question ‘what is bioinformatics’, we can try to frame how bioinformatics works in research.
Bioinformatic skills are also heavily required within the research environment as the volume of data being generated by labs is increasing, so the demand is growing for those with the skills to process and analyse large quantities of data. These skills were utilized by higher education institutes during the pandemic as undergraduate and post-graduate students were often asked to undertake alternative capstone projects completely based online. Bioinformatics or computational biology (which are the same thing) has quickly jumped from a specialist term describing an elite group of biologists that swapped their pipettes for Python and Pearl to a more generic description which encapsulates any form of computational analysis on biological data. While this caricature may often be portrayed, bioinformatics has become an integral part of research and is commonly found as a component of undergraduate and post-graduate programs.
When imaging a bioinformatician, you may think of a dishevelled individual sitting in a dark room, frantically writing code and speaking in a complex and unintelligible jargon.
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