Effect of Visualization Techniques of Bioinformatics to Current Interdisciplinary Challenges

Computers and computational methods play an increasingly important role in the life sciences, and currently form an indispensable tool for a wide range of scientific applications. Bioinformatics is the application of techniques from information technology (computer science, statistics and mathematics). This interdisciplinary approach is rapidly revolutionizing biology. A survey of software tools for bioinformatics is presented. A special emphasis is placed on the visual aspects of these tools. The most important visualization tasks in bioinformatics are data sequence visualization and visualizing protein structures. The visualization of interactions between molecules in a metabolic pathway or network is an emerging area. Many important visualization techniques have yet to be applied in this application area.