BIO COMPUTING

INTRODUCTION

Research at the border of Molecular Biology and Information Technology has witnessed in recent years an exciting development, with remarkable benefits for both areas. On one hand, biological data is being produced at an astounding rate nowadays, supported by the ever increasing advances in biotechnology, and IT-related tools are necessary to handle the data, interpret them, visualize various parameters, etc. Moreover, many combinatoric problems related to these biological data need IT-specific approaches. On the other hand, the biological systems have huge capabilities for information storing, data manipulation, pattern recognition, parallelism, and energy efficiency, that makes them interesting for computer scientists. 

Bio computing is often used as a catch-all term covering all this area at the intersection of Biology and Computation, although many other terms are used to name the same area. There are four joint sub-fields:

• Computational Biology - this includes efforts to solve biological problems with computational tools (such as modeling, algorithms, heuristics).
• Bioinformatics - this includes management of biological databases, data mining and data modeling, as well as IT-tools for data visualization.
• DNA computing and NANO-engineering - this includes models and experiments to use DNA and other molecules to perform computations.
• Computations in living organisms - this is concerned with constructing computational components in living cells, as well as with studying computational processes taking place daily in living organisms.