Bioinformatics Defination

The terms bioinformatics and computational biology are often used interchangeably. However bioinformatics, more properly refers to the creation and advancement of algorithms, computational and statistical techniques, and theory to solve formal and practical problems posed by or inspired from the management and analysis of biological data. Computational biology, on the other hand, refers to hypothesis-driven investigation of a specific biological problem using computers, carried out with experimental and simulated data, with the primary goal of discovery and the advancement of biological knowledge. A similar distinction is made by National Institutes of Health in their working definitions of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, where it is further emphasized that there is a tight coupling of developments and knowledge between the more hypothesis-driven research in computational biology and technique-driven research in bioinformatics. Computational biology also includes lesser known but equally important subdisciplines such as computational biochemistry and computational biophysics. The various definitions of bioinformatics have ben evolved over a period of time and used accordingly. Here is a summary of definitions which would most properly be used in todays scenarion. ( http://www.wikipedia.org )

Fredj Tekaia at the Institut Pasteur offers this definition of bioinformatics:

"The mathematical, statistical and computing methods that aim to solve biological problems using DNA and amino acid sequences and related information."

"Classical" bioinformatics

Most biologists talk about "doing bioinformatics" when they use computers to store, compare, retrieve, analyze or predict the composition or the structure of biomolecules. As computers become more powerful you could probably add simulate to this list of bioinformatics verbs. "Biomolecules" include your genetic material---nucleic acids---and the products of your genes: proteins. These are the concerns of "classical" bioinformatics, dealing primarily with sequence analysis.

The Loose definition

There are other fields---for example medical imaging / image analysis which might be considered part of bioinformatics. There is also a whole other discipline of biologically-inspired computation; genetic algorithms, AI, neural networks. Often these areas interact in strange ways. Neural networks, inspired by crude models of the functioning of nerve cells in the brain, are used in a program called PHD to predict, surprisingly accurately, the secondary structures of proteins from their primary sequences.

http://bioinformatics.org/faq

The study of collecting, sorting, and analyzing DNA and protein sequence information using computers and statistical techniques.

Bioinformatics or computational biology is the use of techniques from applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, and computer science to solve biological problems. Research in computational biology often overlaps with systems biology. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions, and the modeling of evolution

Hence it could be concluded that, bioinformatics can be seen by one’s own perspective and will apply to his/her area of interest and investigation.