Bioinformatics, target discovery and the pharmaceutical/biotechnology industry.

: With the first draft of the human genome now available a directed genome-wide mining strategy is being implemented by many pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in order to identify novel members of the most therapeutically relevant target families. At the same time there is an increasing amount of annotation relevant to the human genome sequence entering into the public domain. The ability to identify protein families on a genome-wide scale can only be done at speed by using high-throughput computational approaches. This review describes many of the latest algorithmic developments in this field and shows how they can be best put to use for target identification and prioritization.