Bioinformatics Centre > Education > Master's degree in Bioinformatics > What is Bioinformatics

What is Bioinformatics?

The core of Bioinformatics is to use computers to obtain new scientific insights in the areas of Biology and Medicine.This includes analyzing (very large!) datasets from experimental laboratories, and to design new methods and algorithms for these purposes. Current biological and medical labs use methods that produce extremely large data sets, which cannot be analyzed by hand - for instance sequencing human genomes. Thus modern biological and medical research and development cannot be done without bioinformatics.

Examples of areas where Bioinformatics is used:

Design of new and better proteins, such as industrial enzymes. This could involve working out by computer simulation, what happens to the protein structure when one amino acid in the protein is replaced by another.
Understanding the evolutionary process by comparing species on DNA level
Characterizing what genes are used in different biological processes, including disease
Research in how genes are regulated in a large regulatory network, where genes regulate each other.

Some few examples of bioinformatics research within the centre:

One of our recent accomplishments was the development of a probabilistic model of local protein structure. The figure shows the native protein structure on the left, the best sampled structure (using our method) next to it, and the best structures for a number of baseline methods (used for comparison) to the right.

Related areas

Computational biology is almost synonymous with Bioinformatics.
There is a large overlap with Systems Biology and some slightly less modern areas as Mathematical Biology.
Almost all the biological omics- techniques has a very large component of Bioinformatics.

Ekstra information / Sidebar

The Programme

The Bioinformatis programme is a two-year Master's programme. You can be accepted with a bachelor's degree in a relevant subject, such as biology, biochemistry, computer science, physics and engineering.

During the Bioinformatics programme you learn:

- Development and advanced use of methods. You primarily learn to understand the bioinformatic methods, so you know how they can be modified and combined for a given problem.

- Implementing problem specific methods. You learn to program, so you can combine methods and datatypes, so for example a complex analysis can be done and repeated by pushing a button.