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 The 21th century is the era of the omics technologies. Recent major scientific and technological breakthroughs in molecular biology combined with the impressive revolution in hardware technology have drastically changed the way of thinking in life sciences research and biotechnology. The application of high-throughput technologies (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, interactomics...) allows mapping the DNA sequence of complete genomes in a short time, analyzing the expression of thousands of genes or proteins simultaneously, evaluating the nature and concentration of all metabolites and identifying the interactions between these different genetic entities. Although the final objective of molecular biology i.e. "acquiring insight in the functioning and evolution of organisms" has remained the same, the way to reach this goal has drastically changed. We have entered the era of "systems biology". An organism is treated as a system and information on all its molecular levels is gathered simultaneously. This new systems approach in molecular biology involves extensive quantitative and integrated analysis of complex data.
This is exactly where the discipline "bioinformatics" comes at the forefront. Bioinformatics is defined as the science and technology of handling high throughput molecular biological information in order to infer new biological insights in diverse applications (industrial, biomedical, ecological,...).
It combines the expertise of different disciplines: IT to store and extract a wide range of different data sources in a concise and comprehensive way, mathematics/engineering/datamining to model and integrate the data, molecular biology to understand and interpret the results. Bioinformatics offers research challenges in each of these disciplines. As bioinformatics is a highly interdisciplinary application field, its Master is an interfaculty program jointly organized by the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, the Faculty of Engineering, the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Medicine of the K.U.Leuven.
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