What is Computational Biology?
Computational biology is a specialised area of bioinformatics that deals with the analysis of information relating to nucleic acid and protein sequences. It involves finding the genes in the DNA sequences of various organisms and developing methods to predict the structure and function of newly discovered proteins. Computational biology also deals with grouping protein sequences into families of related sequences and aligning similar proteins to examine evolutionary relationships.
Computational biologists might object (please do), but, I find that people use “computational biology” when discussing that subset of bioinformatics (in the broadest sense) closest to the field of classical general biology. Computational biologists interest themselves more with evolutionary, population and theoretical biology rather than cell and molecular biomedicine. It is inevitable that molecular biology is profoundly important in computational biology, but it is certainly not what computational biology is all about (see next paragraph). In these areas of computational biology it seems that computational biologists have tended to prefer statistical models for biological phenomena over physico-chemical ones. This is often wise… One computational biologist (Paul J Schulte) did object to the above and makes the entirely valid point that this definition derives from a popular use of the term, rather than a correct one. Paul works on water flow in plant cells. He points out that biolo
