Bioinformatics milestones

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Bioinformatics is the field of science in which biology, computer science, and information technology merge into a single discipline. The ultimate goal of the field is to enable the discovery of new biological insights as well as to create a global perspective from which unifying principles in biology can be discerned. There are three important sub-disciplines within bioinformatics:

the development of new algorithms and statistics with which to assess relationships among members of large data sets
the analysis and interpretation of various types of data including nucleotide and amino acid sequences, protein domains, and protein structures
the development and implementation of tools that enable efficient access and management of different types of information. More...

Listed below are some of the major events in bioinformatics over the last several decades. Most of the events in the list occurred long before the term, "bioinformatics", was coined. In most cases, links take the user to outside sites that provide further explanation of each event and access to related resources.

1962 Pauling's theory of molecular evolution

1965 Margaret Dayhoff's Atlas of Protein Sequences

1970 Needleman-Wunsch algorithm

1977 DNA sequencing and software to analyze it (Staden)

1981 Smith-Waterman algorithm developed

1981 The concept of a sequence motif (Doolittle)

1982 GenBank Release 3 made public

1982 Phage lambda genome sequenced

1983 Sequence database searching algorithm (Wilbur-Lipman)

1985 FASTP/FASTN: fast sequence similarity searching

1988 National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) created at NIH/NLM

1988 EMBnet network for database distribution

1990 BLAST: fast sequence similarity searching

1991 EST: expressed sequence tag sequencing

1993 Sanger Centre, Hinxton, UK

1994 EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, UK

1995 First bacterial genomes completely sequenced

1996 Yeast genome completely sequenced

1997 PSI-BLAST

1998 Worm (multicellular) genome completely sequenced

1999 Fly genome completely sequenced

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Revised November 10, 2003