Bioinformatics at Charles University

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that combines informatics and biology to study biological data, mainly nucleic acids and proteins.

The 21st century biology takes advantage of a major progress in many methodological approaches including genomics and proteomics. This has led to an unprecedented growth of valuable biological data. The speed of sequencing of DNA (the major source of biological data today) has grown about 400x in the last 15 years. Other areas of biology are also shifting towards methods that generate large quantities of data and it is therefore hardly surprising that the amount biological data stored at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), the major repository of biological data in Europe, has grown to 120 petabytes in 2017. The amount of the data deposited at the EBI doubled in less than two years.

Bioinformatics is a relatively new field with the aim of making sense of the growing number of biological data, it concentrates also on deposition and distribution of biological data. The importance of bioinformatics for basic biological research, drug development, medical diagnostics or agriculture is, therefore, growing with every sequenced nucleotide and with every solved 3D structure and it is expected to grow further. There will be also a growing demand for experts (bioinformaticians) who can use existing bioinformatics algorithms or develop new ones.

Bioinformatics is a multidisciplinary field that combines biology, statistics and informatics – and this is reflected in the bachelor, master and doctoral study programme in Bioinformatics. Two faculties of Charles University in Prague – Faculty of Mathematics and Physics and Faculty of Science join their forces to cover the spectrum of expertise needed to teach bioinformatics. The master study programme also includes significant contributions from internationally-renowned institutions, namely EMBL Heidelberg and Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden to ensure that wide spectrum of bioinformatics methods and approaches is well covered and to provide the students an international perspective to promising and rapidly growing field of bioinformatics and computational biology.