Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics and computational biology solve biological problems (usually on the molecular level) with the use of techniques including:

• applied mathematics
• informatics
• statistics
• computer science
• artificial intelligence
• chemistry
• biochemistry

Research in computational biology often overlaps with systems biology. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions, and the modeling of evolution.

Bioinformatics at MIT

Bioinformatics is becoming increasingly relevant to research done at MIT. Researchers working in the fields of genomics, biology, computer science and more use bioinformatics techniques to analyze their data.

Librarians at MIT are ready to help you begin or continue your use of bioinformatics resources. There are a number of databases that you can use to analyze biological data. Erja, Amy and Louisa can help you identify what databases are appropriate for your research and show you the basics of how to use them.