With advances in technology, enormous amounts of data have become available for bioscience researchers. While this high volume of information holds tremendous promise for expanding the science knowledge base, it must be organized for meaningful study. Bioinformatics is a discipline that devises methods for storing, distributing, and analyzing biological data used by diverse areas of research. Bioinformatics professionals develop software and tools that assist researchers in the analysis of data related to molecular biology and genome studies.

1. By Robert Ward Cutler

2. With advances in technology, enormous amounts of
data have become available for bioscience
researchers. While this high volume of information
holds tremendous promise for expanding the
science knowledge base, it must be organized for
meaningful study. Bioinformatics is a discipline that
devises methods for storing, distributing, and
analyzing biological data used by diverse areas of
research. Bioinformatics professionals develop
software and tools that assist researchers in the
analysis of data related to molecular biology and
genome studies.

3. As bioinformatics information is integrated, scientists
develop a comprehensive picture of normal cellular
activities that enables them to study how these activities
become altered in different disease states. Computer
software aids researchers in analyzing and interpreting
data pertaining to nucleotide and amino acid sequences,
protein domains, and protein structures. This software
allows researchers to determine relationships among
components of large data sets. This process might
include methods to identify a gene within a sequence.
The software also facilitates the prediction of protein
structure and/or function, and permits the clustering of
protein sequences into families of related sequences.

4. Robert Ward Cutler, Ph.D. is the developer of
Genehound™, a gene sequencing and
identification software program for prokaryotic
genomes. Dr. Cutler is a bioinformatics expert
and computer consultant with several years’
experience in academic research and teaching.
Robert Ward Cutler was awarded a Fulbright
Research and Teaching Fellowship to lecture in
bioinformatics at Chiang Mai University in
Thailand.