 Dear students in this module, I'm going to introduce bioinformatics to you. Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary area. By interdisciplinary area, I mean that it is a science that is born out of combining biology, mathematics, chemistry, physics and computer science. So all of these disciplines, they come together. Towards understanding biological systems and life in a better way. So therefore, bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary area. It is a new field and was just developed about two decades ago. But the impact that it has on the modern science is absolutely massive. That is why it is a rapidly growing area of science. This should be an inspiration to you. Because in Pakistan, if you want to do cutting edge science then you need a lot of resources. And since we are a limited resource country, it is very difficult for us to buy expensive scientific instruments and other associated equipments. But in the case of bioinformatics, all you need is your computer and a connection to the internet. So you have an interdisciplinary area for you, which helps you to do cutting edge science and does not require a lot of resources as well. Isn't it fantastic? More so, there are vast opportunities for scientific discovery using bioinformatics. Because there is so much of data, which is not yet explored properly and has just come out of experiments, you can process this data further and advance the scientific frontier and make some very exciting discoveries as well. Towards understanding the scope of bioinformatics, you must realize that there are four important things that you should keep in mind. The first one is that once data is output from a biological experiment, you need to store it. Towards storing this data, it should be remembered that this data is not your typical everyday data. This data is huge. This a single file can be in terabytes. How do you store such data? Because if you cannot store it, then obviously you cannot process it later. So the storage of data is a very important problem in bioinformatics. Secondly, so once you get this data and you store it on your disk, then you need to organize it properly. So once you are able to organize it, only then you are able to select certain portions of the data in which you are interested in for further analysis. Thirdly, the analysis itself. So once you have chosen the data of your choice in which you are interested, or you suspect something interesting in that data, then you want to analyze it. So towards analyzing it, you can borrow different techniques from statistics, from mathematics, towards modeling it, and several others. So the analysis part itself is very important as well. And lastly, once you get the analysis done, you have the results upcoming from the analysis, and you want to represent them in a meaningful way. In a way such that the data that you have just processed expresses its inner meaning clearly to the reader. So the activities in bioinformatics and the associated science, they are developing algorithms. So these algorithms can be for data storage, data retrieval, data processing, data visualization, anything. So one of the very important areas in bioinformatics is simply developing newer algorithms that are faster, more efficient towards achieving these four aims. The second part is to write software. So you can have very nice algorithms, but you need to express them into software. So towards writing software, you may want to use a programming language as well. For instance, C or C++. In the field of bioinformatics, Python, Perl, MATLAB, all of them can be used as well. So once you have written software, you want to organize your software in terms of a pipeline. So your pipeline can be, your data is input, it is processed and it is output and represented visually. After you observe some results, you also need to statistically evaluate your findings towards ascertaining that your findings are substantial or significant. And lastly, data visualization using novel charts, drawings and figures. So moving ahead, you need to learn the available bioinformatics tools and then advance them by developing newer algorithms. And lastly, you need to apply these ideas towards eliciting biology, towards eliciting the secrets of life. In conclusion, bioinformatics is well suited to all of us in Pakistan because it is a low resource demanding science. And there is a lot of return on hard work in this area. And then you can have cutting edge deliveries and discoveries from these projects as well.