General Types of “Informatics” techniques in Bioinformatics

Databases

• Building, Querying

• Object DB

• Text String Comparison Text Search

• 1D Alignment

Significance Statistics

• Alta Vista, grep

Finding Patterns

• AI / Machine Learning

• Clustering

• Datamining

Geometry

• Robotics

• Graphics (Surfaces, Volumes)

• Comparison and 3D Matching
  ( Visision , recognition)

Physical Simulation

• Newtonian Mechanics

• Electrostatics

• Numerical Algorithms

• Simulation

Benefits of Bioinformatics

To the patient:
Better drug, better treatment

To the pharma :
Save time, save cost, make more $

To the scientist:
Better science

The types of skills that are appropriate for bioinformatics jobs include the following:

Computer programming (including text processing–PERL, and regular computation–C, C++, Java)

Databases

Probability and statistics

Molecular biology and/or physiology

Who funds bioinformatics research?

The main funding sources have been National Institute of Health (via National Library of Medicine and National Center for Human Genome Research), National Science Foundation (especially Biological Information Resources and Computational Database Activity programs), Department of Energy (through Genome projects), as well as some foundations (Burroughs-Welcome, Keck Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Culpeper Foundation). Some pharmaceutical and biotech companies have grant programs as well.