Bioinformatics is an emerging interdisciplinary area of Science & Technology encompassing a systematic development and application of IT solutions to handle biological information by addressing biological data collection and warehousing, data mining, database searches, analyses and interpretation, modeling and product design. It is mainly the application of information technology to the management of biological data. Therefore it is a rapidly evolving scientific discipline. Being an interface between modern biology and informatics it involves discovery, development and implementation of computational algorithms and software tools. In the last three decades, storage of biological data in public databases has become increasingly common, and these databases have grown exponentially. The biological literature is growing exponentially as well. Strictly speaking, bioinformatics is a subset of the larger field of computational biology, the application of quantitative analytical techniques in modeling biological systems.

Bioinformatics is mainly about answering practical questions and often less about developing elegant algorithms. Main bioinformatics areas of research are Gene Expression/Regulation, Protein/RNA Structure, Ontologies, Genome Sequencing/ Annotation and Molecular Interactions. Therefore bioinformatics has a key role to play in pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors, it is used in reducing the time and cost involved in drug discovery process to custom design drugs and to develop personalized medicine.