Bioinformatics: Past and Present

The paper is devoted to the history of emergence of a new discipline, bioinformatics. There is a whole range of approaches to define the subject of bioinformatics and describe its history. We directly link this discipline with the development of computer technologies and analysis of huge masses of biological information that began in the 1980s. The 1990s saw the rapid worldwide spread of bioinformatics when genome sequencing and mapping data for different species began to come fast like an avalanche. Scientists began to build up computerized databases to store this information. In the 2000s, these information bases were significantly improved and contained information not only on these giant molecules' sequences but also on their functionality. During the same period, DNA biochips (microarrays) began to be used to simultaneously measure expression of a large number of genes and to genotype multiple regions of a genome, and the Human Genome Project was completed. Presently, bioinformatics is a fast-growing separate discipline in its own right, with its own well-developed institutional basis.