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.

A common thread in projects in bioinformatics and computational genomics is the use of mathematical tools to extract useful information from noisy data produced by high-throughput biological techniques. (The field of data mining overlaps with computational biology in this regard.) Representative problems in computational biology include the assembly of high-quality DNA sequences from fragmentary "shotgun" DNA sequencing and the prediction of gene regulation with data from mRNA microarrays or mass spectrometry.¹⁹