Question

You may have heard the two terms: Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. A lot of people use these two terms interchangeably.

Briefly discuss what you think the similarity and difference between these two terms.

Answer 1

Similarities:-

Both these fields involve using computer science in understanding data collected by biologists and health sciences professionals. They share similarities in the problems they aim to solve and their open-sourced approach to development and sharing research. Both fields interact with a wide range disciplines within biology, including genetics and genomics, biochemistry, biophysics, cell biology and evolution.

Differences:-

Computational biology is defined as a data-analytical and theoretical methods, mathematical modeling and computational simulation techniques to the study of biological, behavioral, and social systems. Computational biologists tend to draw upon skills in development of algorithms, mathematical modeling, and statistical evaluation to make inferences from complicated data sets.

whereas,

Bioinformatics uses computational tools and approaches to expand the use of “biological, medical, behavioral or health data, including those to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyze, or visualize such data.” Bioinformatics approaches tend to draw upon skills in software development, database development and management, and visualization methods to convey information contained within data sets.

Simply put, computational biology is about studying biology using computational techniques, which further the understanding of the science. Bioinformatics focuses more on the engineering side and the creation of tools that work with biological data to solve problems.