ABSTRACT
Thirty years since the first use of the term “bioinformatics” [1] the
study of information related to life on earth has entered a new era.
For much of the history of “bioinformatics” (which in this context
is also used to refer to strongly related, although not necessarily
synonymous terms such as “computational biology” or “biocomput-
ing”), the attention has been on developing a deeper understanding
of fundamental biology phenomena. Recent years have seen a new
paradigm emerge for identifying relationships between molecular
information and disease states, largely possible due to significant
increases in the availability of biological and clinical data. The
rapidly evolving field of translational bioinformatics (TBI) is core to
enabling the promise of unveiling such relationships. A major area
of emphasis in TBI is the bridging between traditionally segregated
biological and clinical knowledge sources, which has historically
been the subject of domain-specific informatics communities. TBI
aims to provide an integrative approach, which builds on focused
domain-specific informatics approaches, toward the postulation of
novel testable hypotheses [2].
