Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is the use of computers and computer-accessible data to define, study, categorize, and predict features and function of biological entities.

The term "bioinformatics" is often used interchangeably with the umbrella term "computational biology". Less commonly, bioinformatics is vaguely defined as that term describing an area of computational biology that is more concerned with data handling and data mining, while computational biology would include abstract modeling and simulation. In molecular biology, either term is used.

Bioinformatics is parallel to similar words for related subjects, such as medical informatics