Bioinformatics, or computational biology, as the discipline can also be called, refers to the development of new database methods to store genomic information, computational software programs and methods to extract, process and evaluate this information, and the refinement of existing techniques to acquire the genomic data. Finding genes and determining their function, predicting the structure of proteins and RNA sequences from the available DNA sequence, and determining the evolutionary relationship of proteins and DNA sequences are also part of bioinformatics.

The genome sequences of some bacteria, yeast, a nematode, the fruitfly Drosophila and several plants have been obtained during the past decade, with many more sequences nearing completion. During the year 2000, the sequencing of the human genome was completed. In addition to this accumulation of nucleotide sequence data, elucidation of the three-dimensional structure of proteins coded for by the genes has been...