A field of biology concerned with the development of techniques for the collection and manipulation of biological data, and the use of such data to make biological discoveries or predictions. This field encompasses all computational methods and theories applicable to molecular biology and areas of computer-based techniques for solving biological problems including manipulation of models and datasets.
A biological and computational specialty, sometimes called bioinformatics, in which the DNA sequence of one gene is compared with that of another. The process depends on (1) the use of public databases of DNA and protein sequences, (2) computer programs and algorithms for searching these databases, and (3) the Internet, which connects the inquiries with the databases and the software tools. Three databases are involved: GenBank at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the Data Library of the European Bioinformatics Institute, and the DNA Database of Japan. A number of tools are used, among them BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), a very powerful computer program. In 1995, NCBI was processing about 10,000 searches daily, referring to its nearly 500,000 DNA sequences comprising 350,000,000 nucleotide bases from more than 11,000 biologic species. About 1,500 new DNA sequences were added daily.