Over the past few decades, major developments in the field of molecular biology coupled with advances in genomic technologies have led to an explosive growth in the biological information generated by the scientific community. This necessitated the use of innovative computational approaches for analyzing biological data in order to better understand the cellular processes and make discoveries. Computational biology and bioinformatics, an area that has evolved in response to this challenge, can be viewed as the use of computational methods to handle biological data.
In this talk, we will first provide an overview of molecular biology and bioinformatics. The computational challenges in this domain will be discussed along with several successful applications. The talk will conclude with a mention of some areas of current research in computational biology.