Bioinformatics is the application of computer technology to the understanding and effective use of biological and biomedical data. It is the discipline that stores, analyses and interprets the big data generated by life-science experiments, or collected in a clinical context. This multidisciplinary field is driven by experts from a variety of backgrounds: biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians and physicists.
Apart from analysis of genome sequence data, bioinformatics is now being used for a vast array of other important tasks, including analysis of gene variation and expression, analysis and prediction of gene and protein structure and function, prediction and detection of gene regulation networks, simulation environments for whole cell modelling, complex modelling of gene regulatory dynamics and networks, and presentation and analysis of molecular pathways in order to understand gene-disease interactions.