Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of science that involves the development of methods and software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. It is a subdiscipline of biology and computer science concerned with the acquisition, storage, analysis, and dissemination of biological data. Bioinformatics involves processing, storing, and analyzing biological data, including DNA, RNA, and protein sequences, and creating databases to store experimental data. The primary goal of bioinformatics is to increase the understanding of biological processes by developing and applying computationally intensive techniques such as pattern recognition, data mining, machine learning algorithms, and visualization. Bioinformatics is an essential field for the management of data in modern biology and medicine.

Bioinformatics is a broad field that requires a diverse range of people with diverse skill sets, including programmers, database administrators, biological scientists, statisticians, and web designers. Bioinformatics is used to discover practical insights about human health and biology with all its complexity. Bioinformatics is also used for a vast array of other important tasks, including analysis of gene variation and expression, analysis and prediction of gene and protein structure and function.

To become a bioinformatician, one can pursue a Bachelors degree in Computational Sciences or a Masters degree in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, or Molecular Life Sciences specialization in Bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is an evolving discipline, and expert bioinformaticians now use complex software programs for retrieving, sorting out, analyzing, predicting, and storing DNA and protein sequence data.