Rise and demise of bioinformatics? Promise and progress

Abstract

The field of bioinformatics and computational biology has gone through a number of transformations during the past 15 years, establishing itself as a key component of new biology. This spectacular growth has been challenged by a number of disruptive changes in science and technology. Despite the apparent fatigue of the linguistic use of the term itself, bioinformatics has grown perhaps to a point beyond recognition. We explore both historical aspects and future trends and argue that as the field expands, key questions remain unanswered and acquire new meaning while at the same time the range of applications is widening to cover an ever increasing number of biological disciplines. These trends appear to be pointing to a redefinition of certain objectives, milestones, and possibly the field itself.

Figure 1. Use of the term “bioinformatics” in Google Trends.

The use of the term “bioinformatics” in Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends?q=bioinformatics&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0) plotted with relative scaling, i.e., scaled to the average search traffic for the term (y-axis) during the time period (x-axis) (for additional explanations, check the About document http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/about.html). The trend equation and the R² factor are also shown.