Computation Resources for Molecular Biology: A Special Issue.

Increasingly, computational approaches are having a central role across many areas of research tackling the challenges of understanding the complexity of biological systems. A resource such as BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) (1), which was published in this journal in 1990, has transformed sequence searching because of its speed and power in detect distant but biologically significant relationships. Since then, high-throughput molecular biology technologies have led to a rapid expansion in available sequence, structural and ‘omics data for many systems being studied. Computational biologists, statisticians and mathematicians have been motivated by this exponential growth of data to develop enhanced novel computational tools. Challenges include the storage and cataloguing the primary data, searching for relationships between the data in particular the identification of homology, performing comparative analyses to derive fundamental principles, and integrating of information from different modalities. Via the web, computational resources are readily being made available to researchers in the community, many of whom are not necessarily skilled in computing.