Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that integrates the disciplines of mathematics, statistics and computer science to collect, store, analyze and display the vast amount of biological data that is being generated these days. This includes, but is not limited to, information about biomolecular sequence, structure and function.

It is incredibly difficult to manually analyze, search and make sense of the huge amount of biological data that is currently available. Most of this data is currently freely accessible online. Bioinformatics is widely used these days for genome sequencing, disease diagnosis, evaluation of gene expression, drug discovery and systems biology.

Genomics involves the study of the sequence, structure and function of genomes – the complete set of DNA in the cell of an organism. One of the most significant projects that involved Bioinformatics is the Human Genome Project that set about to sequence the entire genome of a human. Genomes of several organisms are freely available online. These can be analyzed individually or as part of comparative genomics studies to understand the structure and function of genes and how they interact.

Proteomics involves the study of the structure, function, and interactions of the proteins in a cell, tissue or organism. Bioinformatics algorithms are being developed and used to study each stage of this process. Major contributions are made by techniques like sequence alignment, structure based drug discovery and protein-protein interaction networks.

Transcriptomics involves the study of all the RNA molecules that are produced in a cell. This has significant application in the study of diseases where the transcriptome of a normal and a disease cell could be significantly different. DNA microarrays are now being used widely for disease diagnostics including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, etc. Alternations in gene expression can be detected and biological pathways that are perturbed can be identified.