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Briefings in Bioinformatics Advance Access published online on October 31, 2006
Briefings in Bioinformatics, doi:10.1093/bib/bbl035
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Received January 26, 2006
Accepted September 7, 2006

Original papers

Evolving research trends in bioinformatics

Carolina Perez-Iratxeta, Miguel A. Andrade-Navarro, and Jonathan D. Wren *

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Jonathan D. Wren, E-mail: Jonathan.Wren{at}OU.edu


  Abstract

The cross-disciplinary nature of bioinformatics entails co-evolution with other biomedical disciplines, whereby some bioinformatics applications become popular in certain disciplines and, in turn, these disciplines influence the focus of future bioinformatics development efforts. We observe here that the growth of computational approaches within various biomedical disciplines is not merely a reflection of a general extended usage of computers and the Internet, but due to the production of useful bioinformatics databases and methods for the rest of the biomedical scientific community. We have used the abstracts stored both in the MEDLINE database of biomedical literature and in NIH-funded project grants, to quantify two effects. First, we examine the biomedical literature as a whole and find that the use of computational methods has become increasingly prevalent across biomedical disciplines over the past three decades, while use of databases and the Internet have been rapidly increasing over the past decade. Second, we study the recent trends in the use of bioinformatics topics. We observe that molecular sequence databases are a widely adopted contribution in biomedicine from the field of bioinformatics, and that microarray analysis is one of the major new topics engaged by the bioinformatics community. Via this analysis, we were able to identify areas of rapid growth in the use of informatics to aid in curriculum planning, development of computational infrastructure and strategies for workforce education and funding.

Carolina Perez-Iratxeta is a Research Associate at the group of Miguel A. Andrade-Navarro, who holds a Canadian Research Chair at the University of Ottawa. They both work at the Ottawa Health Research Institute in Ontario (Canada). The focus of the group is mainly on data mining and bioinformatics tools applied to particular biomedical subjects like human inherited diseases.

Jonathan D. Wren is a bioinformatics researcher at the University of Oklahoma, focusing on methods of data integration and knowledge discovery.


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