The biochemists examines the molecules of life, with emphasis on the chemical structure and reactivity that shape biological function. While, with advent of large scale gene sequencing, a new scientific discipline; Bioinformatics -- (the word being the favourite of biochemists and those studying 3D structure of macromolecules) was born, that focuses on the analysis of molecular sequences (DNA, RNA and proteins).The tools of Bioinformatics include algorithms and computer programs for analysis of molecular sequences that reveal the structure and function of macromolecules.
It's noted that becoming a bioinformaticist is not the career goal of most of our students. The majority of our students are interested in pursuing careers in health sciences and Life sciences. The objective is not to prepare them for a career in bioinformatics, but to give them proficiency in the basic tools and applications of Bioinformatics. It's also essential that biochemistry students will gain a deeper and more critical understanding in bioinformatics; so that they've an appreciation of the strength and limitations of the tools - they use in their work.
With the explosively increasing high throughput data, it's highly desired to develop effective computational methods that can mine useful information to support the research of biochemistry, biomedicine and drug designing.
As the time needed to store, annotate and analyze this stream information that has grown in the laboratory, Bioinformatics by necessity; emerged as a separate field. In biochemistry, more and more new technologies are developed and the high throughput data generated by such technologies need to be analyzed with bioinformatics methods.
The driving force behind the growth of Bioinformatics is the rapid accumulation of a rich array of data of diverse types. In order to access and exploits this information, biochemists have increasingly dependent on computational approaches to analyze these data sets - that's the goal of bioinformatics.