If you want to know how biology will be practiced in the coming decades, check out a recent National Academy of Sciences colloquium on frontiers in bioinformatics.1 Assembling data is no longer the biggest challenge, says meeting cochair Russ B. Altman, citing sophisticated presentations on pseudogenes, RNA splicing, and molecular evolution. Instead, the major hurdle these days is one of data integration.
Biologists are beginning to form hypotheses that require the computational skills to mine 20 genomes at once, to compile and analyze data from multiple sources that were never intended to be mutually compatible. For now, it's an online game of cut-and-paste that favors younger, more computer-savvy biologists.
But bioinformaticians are working to smooth the process, so that scientists at the bench can worry less about how to get a piece of data, and more about what they want to do with it once they find it.
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