Grand challenges in computational biology

This chapter discusses the grand challenges in computational biology. One useful classification of the challenges facing computational biology is that which distinguishes the individual technical challenges, which define the field, and are termed “infrastructural challenges faced by the field.” These meta-challenges are an inevitable result of the sudden ascendancy of bioinformatics. Unlike most other scientific fields, it has become an economic force before it has been thoroughly established as an academic discipline, with the exception of the protein structure aspects of the field. Another grand challenge facing computational biology is the detection of increasingly distant homologues, or proteins related by evolution from a common ancestor. The computational elucidation of such relationships stands as the fundamental operation and most pragmatic success of the field, because finding homologues is the shortest and surest path to determining the function of a newly discovered gene.