I am not sure exactly what angle you are coming from specifically, but the term "Bioinformatics" covers a much greater field then just rational drug design. Sure you can use bioinformatics for drug design, but you can use it for a WHOLE lot more than just that.

I am not sure exactly what angle you are coming from specifically, but the term "Bioinformatics" covers a much greater field then just rational drug design. Sure you can use bioinformatics for drug design, but you can use it for a WHOLE lot more than just that.

Yes, it can be used for drug design, such as in context of genome-scale metabolic model, the bioinformatic strategies were adapted to identify the potential drug targets.

Thanks Stephen Doyle and Jie Liu!

Yes, the idea is use "bioinformatics" for drug design, and for a whole lot more than just that.. thanks a lot!

My view also coincide with Dr.Doyle. Bioinformatics actually means use of Informatics or computer science in biology. Its not just the drug designing, rather drug designing is coming under the roof of Bioinformatics. Bioinformatics include Sequence analysis, Genome annotation, Computational evolutionary biology, Literature analysis, Analysis of gene expression, Analysis of gene regulation, Analysis of protein expression, Comparative genomics, Modeling biological systems, Biological Database, Biological algorithm, etc. Broadly, it is a branch of bio-science which deals with the storing, retrieving and analyzing biological data. In recent days, Bioinformatics also include algorithms, databases and information systems, web technologies, artificial intelligence and soft computing, information and computation theory, structural biology, software engineering, data mining, image processing, modeling and simulation, discrete mathematics, control and system theory, circuit theory, and bio-statistics.

Conversely, you could say that Bioinformatics is just a branch of Information Technology and Computing Technologies applied specifically to life science data. It really is nothing more then the application of IT and computer technology for the storing, retrieving and analyses of biological data.

The emphasis tends to get placed on genomic biology because of the size of the data sets involved (which in turn means complex data storage, search and retrieval issues), and the computational demands of analyzing massive data sets (as well as the fact that some genomic biology questions are computationally challenging with even the latest computing technology). But really, Bioinformatics, to my mind is no different then what many biologists, as well as scientists in other disciplines, have been doing in some form or another for decades - we've just slapped a distinctive label on it. Just like "Chemoinformatics", or "Medical Informatics",

P.S. And how many realize the term "Bioinformatics" goes back in the late 1970's - it was just "re-discovered" and re-worked a bit with the beginnings of large scale genomics science.

Thank you all! Your answers helped me a lot!

Thank you for the great information, these discussion is very usefull