Computation has become an essential component to the current era of biomedical research, distinguished by its large-scale and system-wide approaches as exemplified by the 1000 Genomes Project,¹  the growth of personalized molecular medicine, and systems biology. Key to this new era of research is the use of high-throughput technologies enabling genome-, proteome- or metabolome-wide studies. Common to all these technologies is the generation of large datasets requiring informatics solutions, including software for complex analyses and other computational resources for capturing, processing, annotating and disseminating data and experimental procedures.

As it has in other ‘-omic’ fields, the reliance on computation...