Computational Molecular Biology: From Sequence Research to Software Development

Computational molecular biology (CMB) is a new science. Its general goal is to understand biological phenomena through computational experiments and plausible reasoning. In a narrow sense, it is concerned with the informational (or symbolic) interpretations of biological phenomena that involve nucleic acid and protein sequences. The focus on symbolic interpretations distinguishes CMB (and molecular biology in general) from physics, chemistry and other fields of “hard” scienCe.* We already have a tremendous amount of sequence data and in the near future we ought to expect several times more. One role for CMB is to find correlations between sequence fragments and their putative biological function. Methods of dealing with this problem are being invented and developed within sequence research (a sub-field of CMB). Other aspects of sequence research include problems such as nucleic acid and protein folding or handling databases of sequences (or structures). This large area of research splits into two (not completely independent) general kinds of activity: