Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary research area that develops methods, software, and tools for understanding biological data at molecular level, particularly analyzing large and complex data sets. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combines biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, information technology, mathematics and statistics to explore and understand the biological data. It involves the technology for storage, retrieval, manipulation, and distribution of information related to biological macromolecules. 

Bioinformatics consists of two subfields: development of databases for different biological macromolecules and Computational Tools for Molecular, sequence, structural and functional analysis, and the application of these tools and databases in generating biological knowledge to better understand living systems. Bioinformatics has not only become essential for basic genomic and molecular biology research, but is having a major impact on many areas of biotechnology and biomedical sciences including: Knowledge-Based Drug Design, Forensics, Agricultural Biotechnology, Studying Microbial Diversity, and Personalized and Customized Medicine.