 Dear students, in this module, I'm going to highlight the need for bioinformatics for you. We'll be covering the need for bioinformatics in two modules, and this is the first one in the series. To motivate you towards the need for bioinformatics, you know that it is an interdisciplinary area, and people from biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and computer science, all of them are coming together towards performing this science. It is such an exciting area that lots of new discoveries are made every day, and it is a wonderful opportunity for all of us as well. The low requirement on part of bioinformatics for infrastructure, for instruments, enables us to utilize bioinformatics towards advancing our own science and understand life. So this is a very interesting, feasible, and useful area for the people in Pakistan. Next is that the vast discoveries that are made from bioinformatics have the potential to change the landscape of the science. This is indeed a very valuable opportunity for all of us. The foundation for bioinformatics is on the large amount of data that is available now on the internet, and you can download it and process it to understand that data better. Towards understanding the amounts of data involved, if you look at this figure, you will realize the exponential nature of the increase of this data. Specifically, this graph is showing you the growth of the entries in uniprot database, which is simply a protein sequence database, or you can call it the number of proteins that are known, the sequences, versus the years on the horizontal axis. As you can see, there is an exponential rise in this data, and this sequence information can be used as input for bioinformatics tools towards understanding biology in a better way. Another example is the growth of protein databases. As shown here in this graph, the blue, the blue bars, they represent the number of sequences, the protein sequences. Of course, they are in millions, but if you look at the red bars, these are the protein structures. So the protein sequences and the protein structures, both of them are growing at a very rapid pace. We need to utilize this data and understand how these proteins, they function within a cell. This is the job of a bioinformatician, and therefore we have a very nice opportunity with us. More so, if you look carefully, the number of structures, the protein structures that is shown here in orange, is actually different from the number of sequences. So there is a very big difference between the number of protein sequences that are known and the number of protein structures that are known. So using bioinformatics, we can also close this gap and try to find out the structures from the protein sequences. This is another job for the bioinformatician. So in conclusion, since the genomic, metabolomic, proteomic information is available now, it is the job of a bioinformatician and there is a need for the bioinformatician to come forward, look at this data and try to fill in the empty voids within our understanding of the biological systems. If you carefully search this data online, and then download it, followed by processing it, you have a chance to turn it into a gold mine.