Bioinformatics: Bringing it all together technology feature

Forget test tubes, petri dishes and pipettes.One of the few pieces of equipment that can be honestly labelled ubiquitous in biology today is the computer.Bioinformatics -the development and application of computational tools to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyse and visualize biological data -is one of biology's fastest-growing technologies.Biologists at the bench studying small networks of genes want user-friendly tools to analyse their results and help them to plan experiments.They need accessible interfaces that allow them to search databases, and compare their data with those of others (see 'Genome analysis at your fingertips' , below).At the other end of the spectrum, researchers analysing whole genomes, and drug-discovery companies mining the genome for drug targets, want highthroughput analysis tools to accelerate genome annotation and extract information from databases in more efficient and sophisticated ways.And all of those involved want more integration -integration of data across the hundreds, if not thousands, of different databases, and visual integration of data to aid interpretation."The key to bioinformatics is integration, integration, integration," says bioinformatics expert Jim Golden at Curagen spin-off 454 Corporation in Branford, Connecticut."To answer most interesting biological problems, you need to combine data from many data sources," agrees Russ Altman, a biomedical informatics expert at Stanford University."However, creating seamless access to multiple data sources is extremely difficult.