What are the different things computer scientists and biologists bring to bioinformatics?
What can each tell the other? AC: Biologists understand what the important problems are and what information would help solve these problems. They bring a very good sense of the molecular data on the computer, and what types of errors get introduced in acquiring the data. They can look at the alignment of molecular sequences and know, maybe, whether it is high quality of not. Nowadays, many biologists are also good at using computer tools and databases to find and analyze the information they need. What computer scientists bring is, first of all, an understanding of the potential and the limitations of the computer tools. If you run your data through a computer tool, in order to assess the results you need to understand how the results are being produced by the tool. The computer scientist understands what the computer is doing and can say, I wouldn t expect it work well on this data or I wouldn t expect it to work well when the sequences are too long . The computer scientist is also a
