The Prefix- and -Suffix of bioinformatics: Bio- and -Omics
From Omics.org
The Prefix- and -Suffix of bioinformatics and biology: Bio- and -Omics
You1, ..., Jong Bhak (Any one is invited to add and elaborate this paper!)
Effectively, the present day (A.D. 2006) bioinformatics was formed as a standalone field in biology around 1995 when the Internet started to connect biologists and bioinformatists in the world with a huge amount of data pouring in from the different fields of biology. That was the year the first complete bacterial genomes were announced. Around then, DNA chip data were introduced. Researchers started having major bioinformatics conferences and training sessions.
Since then, there have been various conceptual plans for organiziing the exploding field of bioinformatics.
There have been two major diversification paths appeared in the development of bioinformatics in terms of project concepts and organization, the -omics and the bio-. These two historically reflect the general trend of modern biology. One is to go into molecular level resolution. Genetics, microbiology, mycology and agriculture became effectively molecular biology since 1970s. At the same time, these fields are now absorbing omics approach to understand their problems more as complex systems.
-omics
Various bioinformatics and biology researchers independently coined the term -omics.
This was at the level of science, especially biology.
This was often done by researchers who have taken up the large scale data analysis and holistic way of solving bio-problems. However, the flood of such '-omics' trends did not occur until late 1990s. Until that time, it was by a relatively small number of informatically advanced people in Europe and the USA. They included MRC Cambridge, Sanger centre, EBI, EMBL, Harvard, Stanford and others.
We could clearly see some people took up the underlying idea of -ome(s) and -omics quickly, as biology was heading for a more holistic approach in understanding the mechanism of life. Whether the suffix is linguistically correct or not, the -omics suffix changed the way many biologists view their research activity. The most profound one is that biologists became freshly aware of the fact that biology is an information science more than they have thought before. Some others hated the trend. They claim that the suffix is not correct and there are only a few truly meaningful and useful -omics fields in bioinformatics and biology in general.
The people who took it up quickly were often young and technically advanced geeks (hackers) in biology.
bio-
The other trend was at the level of technology. This was more practical. They often used the prefix Bio- to various technological and scientific projects or subfields. One of the earlist and most successful was Bioperl. The bio- prefix has important consequences for the philosophy of biology. People are proposing that biology is perhaps the ultimate science for human beings. All other fields gather around biology to make biology a super science discipline as a complex network of physics, mathmatics, computer science, materials science, social and legal studies. This is in a way inevitable. Humans can perhaps never escape the biological body until they transfer the whole information processing capability to machines in the far future.
Summary
As one of the -omics and bio- proponents, we believe that the -omics trend is one of the most important conceptual revolutions in science. For the first time in science, so many small details started to gather into a giant network of organic science to pursue an ambitious attempt of understanding life as a whole informational network (networkome). This is also very important in social terms. People in the globalization era realize that the whole world is connected so tightly, they need to fuse their activities in the forming network. One of the best examples is the Internet. Another good example of such connectivity is the current global interest in the climate as a result of global warming. Both examples are something that people actually feel in everyday life.
We predict that the future biology will be reorganized by the -omics paradigm.
