Bioinformatics means combining the fields of statistics and computer science and applying them to the field of molecular biology form drug desinging ,analysis and other studies.

The term bioinformatics was given in 1978 by Paulien Hogeweg and Ben Hesper.Bioinformatics now entails the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data.

Over the past few decades rapid developments in genomic and other molecular research technologies and developments in information technologies have combined to produce a tremendous ount of information related to molecular biology. It is the name given to these mathematical and computing approaches used to glean understanding of biological processes.Common activities in bioinformatics include mapping and analyzing DNA and protein sequences, aligning different DNA and protein sequences to compare them and creating and viewing 3-D models of protein structures.

The primary goal of bioinformatics is to increase the understanding of biological processes. What sets it apart from other approaches, however, is its focus on developing and applying computationally intensive techniques (e.g., pattern recognition, data mining, machine learning algorithms, and visualization) to achieve this goal. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, drug design, drug discovery, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and proteinâ?"protein interactions, genome-wide association studies and the modeling of evolution.

There are two fundamental ways of modelling a Biological system (e.g. living cell) both coming under Bioinformatic approaches
Static

Sequences Proteins, Nucleic acids and Peptides
Structures Proteins, Nucleic acids, Ligands (including metabolites and drugs) and Peptides
Interaction data among the above entities including microarray data and Networks of proteins, metabolites


Dynamic

Systems Biology comes under this category including reaction fluxes and variable concentrations of metabolites
Multi-Agent Based modelling approaches capturing cellular events such as signalling, transcription and reaction dynamics

A broad sub-category under bioinformatics is structural bioinformatics.