Bioinformatics and Data Integration in Membrane Transporter Studies

With a history of less than 30 years, bioinformatics is a rapidly growing area that applies computational approaches to solve biological problems. Similar to the composition of the word itself, “bioinformatics” is an independent field developed from the union of computer science and molecular biology. This merge was started in 1970s, when it was found that RNA secondary structure might be predicted with computational techniques (1 ,2 ). At that time, people began to build databases of nucleic acids (3 ) and proteins (4 ). Algorithms and programs were developed to translate DNA sequences into protein sequences (5 ,6 ) and to detect patterns including restriction enzyme recognition sites (7 ,8 ). With years of efforts, sequence analysis methodologies are maturing and have become the most important part of bioinformatics.