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The revolution in biology that started in the second half of the 20th century has depended on an equally amazing revolution in computers in a significant way. It is not surprising that the two fields have found a great deal of overlap. First, many of today's experiments produce huge amounts of data that cannot be captured or stored without computers. Analyzing it may involve comparing billions of pieces of information to billions of others-- also impossible without the help of machines. Another use of computers is to solve extremely complex biological puzzles, such as looking at the amino acids that make up a protein and predicting the shape they will form, which is an important clue to the molecule's functions.

Now, during the first decade of the 21st century, researchers are using computers to model and simulate biological processes. Limitations in technology restricted early molecular biologists to observing a few components of a biological process at a time; today, the same events in cells are seen as taking place against a background of networks of molecules that shift from one state to the next in very complex ways. It takes a computer model to keep track of the components, let alone predict how the entire system will change when something happens. For all of these reasons, computers have become indispensable to biological research.

Gregor Mendel's talents at statistics were essential in allowing him to analyze inheritance in peas and other plants. The method exposed the dominant or recessive nature of alleles and other aspects of the behavior of genes. Thomas Hunt Morgan's laboratory used the rates at which genes were inherited together to map their locations on specific chromosomes. When the first computers were built, they were put to work on biological questions: Millions of calculations were needed, for example, to interpret the diffraction patterns produced by X-ray experiments, aiming to uncover the structure of protein crystals.

With the arrival of DNA sequencing, computers became essential partners in everyday biology. In 1982, Greg Hamm and Graham Cameron, two researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, proposed collecting DNA sequence data in a universal public database. The project they created is now known as EMBL Bank and is hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), a bioinformatics center run by the EMBL near Cambridge, England. At nearly the same time, an American group created a database called GenBank, originally hosted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, now moved to the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Maryland. The two groups and another project in Japan worked out a system for exchanging data to offer a free, worldwide, up-to-date service that researchers across the world can access online. As of February 2009, the databases contained 100 gigabases of information about DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. . .

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