The Challenge of Bioinformatics

These days, reference to "terabits of accumulated data" has become one of the most notorious cliches in life science. Whole genome datasets are available for DNA sequence, gene expression, metabolomics analysis, siRNAs are facilitating gene knock-out studies, high content screening methods are enabling a close-up look at cell function and other OMICs technologies continue to evolve rapidly. However, data interrogation techniques lag behind advancing experimental technology, which may not be obvious to the typical researcher.

Wet lab biologists and chemists are naturally skeptical about in silico methods, pre-processed literature and genome-scale experiments. OMICs data is notoriously "noisy", text-mining techniques will undoubtedly produce an abundance of false associations, and statistics-based tools have also had limited utility