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From inception to current challenges in bioinformatics

Dr Paulien Hogeweg — professor of bioinformatics at Utrecht University, who in the 1970s, together with Ben Hesper, coined the term ‘bioinformatics’ — talks to Nature Computational Science about her work on the Cellular Potts model, the integration of spatial information in modeling approaches, and her ongoing research on multilevel evolution.

My interest in the field started a long time ago. By the early 1970s, I had completed my master’s degree in field ecology, and my experimental work had led to the generation of a lot of data. At the time, the practice was to try and plot the data or to shuffle it around a little bit. But we didn’t have computers for students back then, so we could not obtain interesting insights from the data. I was then referred to the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica where I could get access to computers. It was surprising to me that even the most basic analysis could give better insights into the data, indicating that more could be possible. From there, I went to a theoretical biology institute in Leiden where I met Ben Hesper, which led to a longtime collaboration with him. We realized early on that the availability of information processing machines (computers) allowed us to study biological systems as information processing systems, which led us to coin the term ‘bioinformatics’.

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  1. Nature Computational Science https://www.nature.com/natcomputsci

    Ananya Rastogi

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Rastogi, A. From inception to current challenges in bioinformatics.
Nat Comput Sci (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00567-3

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  • Published: 13 December 2023

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00567-3

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