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The View From Here John Wooley Bioinformatics in drug discovery: knowledge management via the integration of multiscale, multimodal information  Bioinformatics
has become an essential component of 21st century biology. The pharmaceutical
industry, which has a need for information management of experimental research
and for modeling, helped the field to grow in the 1990s. Today, the very
complexity of biology and the high information content of its data have
encouraged experimentalists to adopt computing.
The applications of bioinformatics to drug discovery is very broad, including research on ligand docking, molecular recognition and the need to move to flexible docking, as well as challenges to traditional approaches of design, along with the use of structure-based design toward specific inhibitors. A comprehensive review of bioinformatics and its importance, including for drug discovery, is provided by a newly published NRC Study, ‘Catalyzing Inquiry at the Interface between Computing and Biology’ (available from the National Academy of Sciences, see also in “Abstracts of Key Research Papers"). This issue of E-Choice highlights the challenges and opportunities arising from the use of bioinformatics in drug discovery.
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