Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Russ Altman has an interesting post on his blog:Bioinformatics & Computational Biology = same? No.
I spent the first 15 years of my professional life unwilling to recognize a difference between bioinformatics and computational biology. It was not because I didn’t think that there was or could be a difference, but because I thought the difference was not significant. I have changed my position on this. I now believe that they are quite different and worth distinguishing. For me,
- Computational biology = the study of biology using computational techniques. The goal is to learn new biology, knowledge about living sytems. It is about science.
- Bioinformatics = the creation of tools (algorithms, databases) that solve problems. The goal is to build useful tools that work on biological data. It is about engineering.
Personally, I have made the same distinguishing, but for some reason with the terms somewhat reversed. For me, computational biology has always been about the development of methods and tools, while bioinformatics has been about appyling methods to study biology.
I suppose someone can argue with the my use of the term “bioinformatics” as an engineering discipline. That’s fine–I’m open to a different term. But I would ask why bioinformatics isn’t good. I think computational biology is more solid–the ‘biology’ is clearly the noun and the ‘computational’ is clearly the adjective.
Good point for that use of the terms. My reasoning for the other use was that computational biology clearly had a focus on the “computational” and isn’t just studying biology by running computer programs.
Anyway, the actual terms are not so important, but I completely agree that the mix of mathematics/statistics, computer science and biology — whatever we call that mix — consists of several disciplines:
- Tools and methods development
- Applying tools and methods in data analysis
I wouldn’t put the first item, tools and methods development, entirely in an “engineering” box, though. Some tools development is just an engineering exercise, implementing existing well known methods, but some method development involves formalising new hypothesis and implementing ways of checking them into computer tools.
The same goes for the second point; applying tools can range from running data through a pipeline with very little other user involvement to detailed and careful analysis of all computational results compared to the underlying biological hypothesis.
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February 18th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
But “informatics” by itself refers to the applied forms of computing, particularly database use — for example “medical informatics” deals with the problem of using databases to keep track of hospital patients, their needed medication, (and in less enlightened nations like the US, their bill as well) rather than the more interesting problems also involving medicine and computers where SNPs are correlated with diseases or something. So wouldn’t “bioinformatics” be naturally the creation and maintenance of biological databases?
February 18th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Hi — I’ve linked to this piece from another, as I believe it’s relevant to my own viewpoint on such distinctions. Hope that’s ok, and that I got your meaning straight!
February 19th, 2009 at 7:48 am
Jonathan: I get your point. I am not saying that I have ever used the terms correctly, just that I also made the distinction that Russ uses (almost, anyway). I am probably getting the terms wrong ;)
In my experience, though, people associated “bioinformatics” with lots of different things…
February 19th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Oh, agreed. Take the journal Bioinformatics for example — no matter which way you define the two terms, clearly both Bioinformatics and Computational Biology are published in it.