Computer scientist Bronislava Brejová. (source: Archive of B. B.)
In biology nowadays, there is a great boom in technologies that generate a lot of data, which is mainly DNA and RNA sequencing. This information can be used to study genetic information in humans and other organisms, as well as indirectly to find out what is happening in cells and to see various events within them.
With the amount of data produced, you have to figure out how to process it, create tools, or it might be difficult to run in cases when software exists . That is where computer scientists come in regarding to biology. On the other hand, biology is an interesting area for computer scientists to apply the technology.
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"When new sequencing technology started to take off, informatics had to overcome the problem with the growing amount of data. Then it stabilised, but today again the quantities exceed the current possibilities and it's necessary to manage that again," explains computer scientist Bronislava Brejová from the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of Comenius University in Bratislava. Her main area of expertise is bioinformatics, an interdisciplinary field that develops computer methods and tools for understanding complex biological data.
Recently, she has been nominated in the Slovak Woman of the Year poll in the Science and Research category. Talking to the Slovak Spectator, she explained her research.
"The nomination is a great honour and I take it as an opportunity to make bioinformatics visible and to show that there can be women in informatics as well," she says.
Everything is in computers
Brejová's background is computer science, she did not study biology at all. It all started when she started to learn programming on very old computers in primary school.
