Bioinformatics and computational biology involves the use of techniques including applied mathematics, informatics?, statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, chemistry and biochemistry to solve biological problems usually on the molecular level. Research in computational biology is often overlaps with system biology. Major research efforts I the field include sequence alignment , gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, predication of gene expression and protein- protein interactions, and the modeling of evolution. Bioinformatics is the application of computer technology to the management of biological information. Computers are used to gather, store, analyze and integrate biological and genetic information which can then be applied to gene- based drug discovery and development. The need for Bioinformatics capabilities has been precipitated by the explosion of publicly available genomic information resulting from the Human Genome Project.

The science of Bioinformatics, which is the melding of molecular biology with computer science, is essential to the use of genomic information in understanding human diseases and in the identification of new molecular targets for drug discovery. In recognition of this, many universities, government institutions and pharmaceutical firms have bioinformatics groups, consisting of computational biologist and bioinformatics computer scientists. Such groups will be key to the unraveling the mass of information generated by large scale sequencing efforts underway in laboratories around the world.

Job Opportunities: Researcher at research institute, Pharmaceutical and Biomedical scientist, Hospitals, Informatics developer, Computational chemist, Clinical Pharmacologist, Bio-Analytics, Employers at Biotechnology Firms