Bioinformatics is the application of statistics and computer science to the field of molecular biology. The term bioinformatics was coined by Paulien Hoge weg and Ben Hesper in 1978 for the study of informatic processes in biotic systems. Its primary use since at least the late 1980s has been in genomics and genetics, particularly in those areas of genomics involving large-scale DNA sequencing. Bioinformatics now entails the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data. Over the past few decades rapid developments in genomic and other molecular research technologies and developments in information technologies have combined to produce a tremendous amount of information related to molecular biology. It is the name given to these mathematical and computing approaches used to glean understanding of biological processes. Common activities in bioinformatics include mapping and analysing DNA and protein sequences, aligning different DNA and protein sequences to compare them and creating and viewing 3-D models of protein structure.
Bioinformatics, the use of computers to address biological questions, has become an essential tool in biological research. It is one of the critical keys needed to unlock the information encoded in the flood of data generated by genome, protein structure, transcriptome and proteome research and covers both the more traditional approaches to bioinformatics, including gene and protein sequence analysis and structure prediction, and more recent technologies such as datamining of transcriptomic and proteomic data to provide insights on cellular mechanisms and the causes of disease.