Bioinformatics is the application of computer technology to get the information that's stored in certain types of biological data.

Bioinformatics provides central, globally accessible databases that enable scientists to submit, search and analyse information. It offers analysis software for data studies and comparisons and provides tools for modelling, visualising, exploring and interpreting data.

Main goal is to convert multitude of complex data into useful information and knowledge.

Current biological and medical labs use methods that produce extremely large data sets, which cannot be analyzed by hand - for instance sequencing human genomes. Thus modern biological and medical research and development cannot be done without bioinformatics.