 Dear students, in this module I am going to introduce to you the very exciting area of bioinformatics as well as provide some background to it. Bioinformatics is a relatively new development in the science as compared to physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology. It is at the intersection of several of these sciences that bioinformatics is born. The need for bioinformatics has arisen from the modern biology. The human genome project and several other similar projects have led us to realize that there are thousands of genes within the human cell. More so, if you look at these genes, then they have these products after their transcription at the transcriptome level. Moreover, these transcription products translate into proteins. At the protein level, there are hundreds of thousands of proteins as well. So there is this explosion of information from the genome level to the protein level. Additionally, if you look closely, then there are several organelles within a cell and the cell itself has certain properties. Several of these cells, they come together to form a tissue and the overall properties of the tissue are totally different. So given this bewildering complexity of information, how does one go about it? And modern day biology continues to produce data every day at a rapid pace and therefore the need for bioinformatics. The name bioinformatics is simple to understand bio for being biology and informatics for the information processing that we perform on the biological data. So therefore, bioinformatics is a discipline which pertains to the information processing of data that is coming out from biological experiments. If you look at the experimental protocols that are available in the biological wet labs, then you will see that a lot of new instruments are making their way. For instance, the next generation sequencers, the protein structure elicitation through nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy as well as high resolution mass spectrometry. So given these next generation equipments, these instruments, the data that is produced is absolutely huge. Now towards storing this data, towards processing this data and then later towards analyzing and understanding this data, you need fast computers. You need accompanying algorithms. You need the tools and techniques to mine this data and understand the output better. So in other words, biology has been digitalized. You have the data that comes to you in the form of images, in the form of text, in the form of numbers and we know it well that this kind of information can be dealt by a computer very nicely. The human memory is limited in storing this information but the computer is infinitely capable of recalling the information that is stored in it and we can leverage this towards bioinformatics. Another important point to note in the background to bioinformatics is that the data which is already there is simply not the problem. The problem arises when this data is expanding at a very fast rate. Call it an exponential rate. The databases with sequences, with genes, with proteins, with protein structures are simply exploding with the new reports. So the data that you already had was to be processed but what will happen after five years when your data will simply be several times of what it is today? So you need to develop software in order to process this data and better understand the meaning that is hidden within these experimental datasets. So in conclusion as I just mentioned that the human mind is limited in its ability to recall data but the computers that are now available with us can store terabytes of data and recall it at the command of our finger. So using this capability of the computers we can understand the biological information in a much better way. More so once we recall this information we can analyze this towards understanding the biology that is underlying all of this data, the disease that is given rise to and possibly the drug and therapeutic responses as well.