Can Bioinformatics Be Considered as an Experimental Biological Science?

TL;DR

This paper argues for recognizing bioinformatics as an experimental biological science by demonstrating how it generates testable hypotheses validated through laboratory experiments.

Contribution

It introduces three examples illustrating how bioinformatics can produce experimentally verifiable biological hypotheses, challenging its traditional view as merely a tool.

Findings

Bioinformatics can generate experimentally testable hypotheses.

Theoretical models in bioinformatics lead to verifiable experiments.

Bioinformatics bridges computational and experimental biology.

Abstract

The objective of this short report is to reconsider the subject of bioinformatics as just being a tool of experimental biological science. To do that, we introduce three examples to show how bioinformatics could be considered as an experimental science. These examples show how the development of theoretical biological models generates experimentally verifiable computer hypotheses, which necessarily must be validated by experiments in vitro or in vivo.