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Quick definition
Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that strives to understand biological data using computational means. It combines computer science, statistics, mathematics, engineering as well as physics to analyze and interpret biological data.
Scope of the field
Bioinformaticians are interested in the study of biological molecules and their mode of mechanism in the body. Some popular areas of study include proteins (e.g. p53) and RNA.
Applications of the field
Experimental data are usually insufficient to derive conclusions on the mechanisms of biomolecules (e.g. how proteins specifically detect their targets in the cell). This may be due to the fact that such experiments are *in vitro *(experiments conducted out of the body), thus are one-dimensional and hard to generalize to the more complex environment in vivo. Also, many of these experiments may simply provide limited information about proteins / RNA / other biomolecules, such as their sequence or limited structural information. Hence, computational methods are needed to build 2D or 3D models of these sequence to enable better visualization and understanding the complex systems in play.
In addition, the new (and deeper) understanding gained through bioinformatics can help inspire more targeted experiments. For instance, if a simulation predicts that a particular amino acid may play an important role in the function of a protein, experimentalists may want to try mutating that particular amino acid and observe whether the function is conserved. This is much more targeted compared to experimentalists randomly mutating amino acids in a more than 100 amino acid long protein, saving resources and time.