How similar are living beings? What are the genetic differences between people? Are people really the descendants of the Neanderthals? How can animal species adapt to the living environment? Damage to what genes is responsible for the appearance of different illnesses? Can the side effects of medicines be predicted from their structural properties?

All these questions can today be answered by bioinformatics. In recent decades, with the development of genomics and other molecular experimental techniques, researchers have obtained a huge amount of data from the field of molecular biology. Techniques of bioinformatics enable these data to be suitably processed, to search them for informative patterns and by analysing them to improve understanding of biological processes. Typical fields of use of bioinformatics are to arrange sequences of proteins and nucleic acids, search for genes, composing genomes from short sequences, phylogenetic analysis, forecasting protein structures and active parts of proteins, analysis of gene expression, discovering genetic networks, analysis of data on polymorphisms, protein interactions and modelling biological processes and evolution.

The scientific field of bioinformatics is intended for two profiles of student. Students with prior knowledge of biomedicine will be taught the use of modern computer approaches for solving problems in these fields. Studies in this field will similarly be of interest to students from technical faculties, mainly from computer studies who will be taught to apply their computer knowledge to the increasingly attractive field of bioinformatics.