Bioinformatics helps biologists with the increasingly needed integration and analysis of

large amounts of data, but of course the deeper connections that numerous individual bio­

informatic analyses reveal about life are much more fascinating. So in this part, we want

to do more “computational biology” and get to the bottom of biological information pro­

cessing, and here we describe some fascinating insights emerging in the currently tumultu­

ous fields of bioinformatics omics, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence and

neurobiology, and ecosystem modeling. Other current areas of bioinformatics, such as

image processing and drug design, also provide exciting new insights, but seem somewhat

less central as other pacesetters in modern bioinformatics.

Biology is the key science of the twenty-first century and bioinformatics is its compu­

tational spearhead. Sequence analysis of DNA, RNA and proteins as well as the analysis

of metabolic and regulatory networks lay the foundations of today’s bioinformatics (Part I).

Heuristics and good databases, encoded molecular information and clever strategies to

solve NP problems with combinatorics approximately and quickly, along with increas­

ingly powerful computers, are the informatics arm that has made modern bioinformatics

so strong. The insight into the molecular biological design of the cell and the system

effects, the knowledge of biological signals and their decoding with neural networks,

sequence analysis or hidden Markov models enabled a systems biology view in bioinfor­

matics that can model or at least analyze almost any process in the cell. Today, the observa­

tion of evolution, for example of protein sequences, allows the functionally important

conserved regions in an enzyme to be determined and labelled in a matter of seconds and

also the domain composition to be understood, at least functionally (Part II).

The upswing in bioinformatics can be seen very tangibly in current genomics. For

example, we can now describe much better how individual our genome is. Every person

has his or her SNPs, indels and copy number variations (a total of several percent indi­

vidual differences). Fascinating insights into the individuality of each person are only now

possible through modern genome informatics (entry).

Part III

What Is Catching and Fascinating About

Bioinformatics?