Preface
The history of biological research is filled with examples of new
laboratory techniques which, at first, are suitable topics for
doctoral theses but eventually become so widely useful and standard
that they are learned by most undergraduates. The use of computer
programming in biology research is such an increasingly standard
skill for many biologists. Bioinformatics is one of the most rapidly
growing areas of biological science. Fundamentally,
it's a cross-disciplinary study, combining the
questions of computer science and programming with those of
biological research.As active sciences evolve, unifying principles and techniques
developed in one field are often found to be useful in other areas.
As a result, the established boundaries between disciplines are
sometimes blurred, and the new principles and techniques may result
in new ways of seeing the science as a whole. For instance, molecular
biology has developed a set of techniques over the past 50 years that
has also proved useful throughout much of biology in general.
Similarly, the methods of bioinformatics are finding fertile ground
in such fields as genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology,
evolutionary science, development, cell studies, clinical research,
and field biology.In my view,
bioinformatics,
which I define broadly as the use of computers in biological
research, is becoming a foundational science for a broad range of
biological studies. Just as it's now commonplace to
find a geneticist or a field biologist using the techniques of
molecular biology as a routine part of her research, so can you
frequently find that same researcher applying the techniques of
bioinformatics. Molecular biology and bioinformatics may not be the
researcher's main areas of interest, but the tools
from molecular biology and bioinformatics have become standard in
searching for the answers to the questions of interest. The Perl
programming language plays no small part in that search for answers. |
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