Lecture: Bioinformatics at the heart of Life Science Research

The term 'bioinformatics' was only coined about 30 years ago, but since that time computational analysis in the data rich Life Sciences has become ever more necessary and fundamental to our understanding of biological processes. Public data resources (e.g. at EMBL-EBI and SIB) provide access to a huge amount of data and are growing rapidly. The application of new AI methods (e.g. AlphaFold for predicting protein structures) offers new opportunities to analyse and combine these data to address fundamental biological questions. This seminar will provide a historical perspective of the development of bioinformatics leading towards the current status and how it might be applied to solve the health and environmental challenges of the future.