Abstract

In the past decades, many advanced bio-technologies have accelerated frontier research to explore biological systems including cell, the basic unit of life. Experimental exploration of cellular environment, however, will be difficult as it requires not only huge labor efforts and costs but also large number of samples for reproducible research. With large volume of available biological data generated, bioinformatics becomes an important hybrid science subject to support systematic and comprehensive data storage, processing and analysis. In joint with statistics and algorithms, biological data such as DNA sequences have been more efficiently processed by bioinformatics methods. Unlike sequential data, biological structures are usually more dynamic and stochastic, thus, structural biology is more challenging a task for bioinformatics.