Running to catch up in Europe | Nature


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Across Europe, the story is the same. Demand for those skilled in bioinformatics exceeds supply. Like biochemistry and biophysics before it, bioinformatics is crushing the barriers between


traditional academic fields, and demanding flexibility and a new way of thinking from its adherents.


Computational biology has meant different things to different people. Not too long ago, says Hans Prydz of the University of Oslo's Biotechnology Centre, it meant handling NMR data or


analysing Doppler echograms. Now renamed bioinformatics, it means looking for patterns in DNA and RNA, predicting protein structure, modelling proteins and mining massive databases that


continue to grow. When the DNA database run by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) was first set up, it contained 700,000 nucleotides: now there are more than a billion.


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