Limitations of Bioinformatics and Data Mining

Bioinformatics and data mining are most useful, when used for analysis of experimental data. Therefore, dependence on experimental data is the major limitation of the subject of bioinformatics and data mining. Sometimes bioinformatics and data mining also prove useful, when used independently, without any laboratory experiments. This emerging area has sometimes been described as in silico biology.

For instance, electronic PCR, electronic restriction digestion, electronic southern hybridization and even in silico FISH have been suggested and tried. But in majority of cases, bioinformatics and data mining will prove extremely useful only when these tools are used for analysing the data generated from experimental work. This is being done successfully in a large number of genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics and Metabolomics research projects. Human genome project and other whole genome sequencing projects are the most important examples, where sequencing data could not have been handled without the tools of bioinformatics. In all these cases the data are managed and meaningful information is derived only with the help of bioinformatics tools