The advancements of computational and informational techniques have enabled in
silico testing of many lab-based experiments in life sciences before performing them
in in vitro or in vivo. Though computational techniques are not capable of mimicking
all wet-lab experiments, bioinformatics will inevitably play a major role in future
medical practice. For example, in the pursuit of new drugs it can reduce the costs and
complexity involved in expensive wet-lab experiments. It is expected that by 2010,
sequencing of individual genomes will be affordable generating an unprecedented
increase of life sciences data, in the form of sequences, expressions, networks,
images, literature. Pattern recognition techniques lie at the heart of discovery of new
insights into biological knowledge, as the presence of particular patterns or structure
is often an indication of its function