What is the difference between Computational Biology & Bioinformatics?

What is the difference between systems biology and bioinformatics?

• Answer:

  There are lots of research projects that could easily fit into both categories, so it's mostly a question of how you choose to promote your work (e.g. for funding and publication). Systems Biology is a newer name for this kind of work and is perhaps a little "sexier" right now, so lots of researchers are choosing to adopt that label. I would say that there is a spectrum between these two topics and some mixture in the middle. On the far bioinformatics end of the spectrum I would put genome assembly, which is a purely computational/informatic problem that is technologically relevant to biologists because they want to assemble sequenced genomes from reads. I would put Stan Liebler's work, for example, on the far systems biology end of the spectrum, where the biology and biophysics is the focus and the computation is purely a research tool. The work of the Palsson lab at UCSD to build automatic pipelines for constructing large "genome scale models" of metabolism is somewhere in the middle since they provide a technology to the community but also use the models themselves to reach some biological insight. See citations below for an example. References Balaban, N. Q., Merrin, J., Chait, R., Kowalik, L., & Leibler, S. (2004). Bacterial persistence as a phenotypic switch. Science. Feist, A. M., Henry, C. S., Reed, J. L., Krummenacker, M., Joyce, A. R., Karp, P. D., … Palsson, B. Ø. (2007). A genome-scale metabolic reconstruction for Escherichia coli K-12 MG1655 that accounts for 1260 ORFs and thermodynamic information. Molecular Systems Biology