Bioinformatics/Introduction

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Computational Biology is a branch of biology which implements the use of computers to help answer biological questions. Classical biology involves the use of experiments, where a hypothesis is formed and objectively tested. This can be applied to computational biology, with experiments substituted by computers. The possibilities of using computers with biology are as vast as biology as a discipline because technically any biological problem can involve the use of computers.

However when one mentions computational biology, some applications pop up more often than others. These might include sequence alignments, searching for regulatory sequences and mainly work done with genomic DNA sequences. This is because of the increasing amount of genome projects being completed and the usefulness that computers have brought to the analysis of genomic sequences.

Computational biology is a growing discipline and as computers get more sophisticated, it will be a very important complement to experimental biology.