Bioinformatics is a sub-discipline of molecular biology

Via twitter I’ve been seeing this phrase emerge from Eagle Genomics annual conference.

This shot from a presentation showing a slide titled Bottom-up bioinformatics helps clear the air a little*:

There‘s a picture of some Lego figures. No sure what going on there.

But I hope you can read the writing below the title – ’Bioinformatics is a sub-discipline of molecular biology’.

Ah, an old hobby horse – although I usually approach this by replacing ‘bioinformatics’ with ‘computational biology’. Not that there is a hard-and-fast line between the two despite previous attempts of mine to distinguish them.

A reason I prefer to put myself under the title computational biologist is to remind people that it’s biology I’m doing, not IT per se.

It’s also because there is a research as well as service, something I worry some don‘t fully appreciate. I like the notion that computational biology is just the theoretical biology on which a fair chunk of molecular biology rests.

I’d love to learn the full context of this slide.**

And what was with the Lego pieces. I mean one has a pick-axe stabbed through him. What‘s with that?

Footnotes

Source: this tweet by Ivan Karabaliev.

* I still don’t have the full context. **What you get for not being there.