Selected Fields 2015

Future - Bioinformatics

future-2015Bioinformatics is a field in which mathematics, statistics, and computer algorithms are harnessed towards novel biological discoveries. Bioinformatics methodologies have revolutionized biology, by making it more quantitative and less descriptive. Furthermore, bioinformatics methods, software tools, and databases allow obtaining insights from huge increase in available biological data, such as genomes, expression data and protein structures.

Bioinformatics plays an important role in many fields of biology, including genetics, genomics, evolution, metabolomics, and structural biology. Bioinformatics tools help analyze and catalogue biological pathways, networks, and processes and provide models and predictions to how biological system function and how they evolved. Bioinformaticians often use simulations to mimic biological processes in-silico.

The primary goal of bioinformatics is to increase the understanding of biological processes, focusing on developing and applying computationally intensive techniques such as pattern recognition, data mining, machine learning algorithms and visualization. These techniques are then harnessed towards answering biological questions which cannot be tackled by traditional approaches. Bioinformatics research tools are now common practice in any bioscience laboratory and the impact of bioinformatics on medicine, ecology, and cell biology is expected to increase in the very near future. 

The 2015 Dan David Prize for the Future Time Dimension will be awarded to an outstanding individual or organization that has made a major contribution to the field of Bioinformatics and continues to significantly advance this field.