Introduction

Abstract

Bioinformatics is a discipline which originally arose for the utilitarian purpose of introducing order into the massive data sets produced by the new technologies of molecular biology. These techniques originated with large-scale DNA sequencing and the need for tools for sequence assembly and for sequence annotation, i.e., determination of locations of protein-coding regions in DNA. A parallel development was the construction of sequence repositories. The crowning achievement has been the sequencing of the human genome and, subsequently of many other genomes.