With a large number of prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes completely sequenced and more forthcoming, access to the genomic information and synthesizing it for the discovery of new knowledge have become central themes of modern biological research. Mining the genomic information requires the use of sophisticated computational tools. It therefore becomes imperative for the new generation of biologists to initiate and familiarize with a field of study that is concerned with the careful storage, organization and indexing of information in order to tackle the new challenges in the genomic era. Information science has been applied to biology to produce a field is called bioinformatics. It is concerned with the state of- the-art computational tools available to solve biological research problems. The term bioinformatics was coined by Paulien Hogeweg and Ben Hesper to describe “the study of informatic processes in biotic systems” and it found early use when the first biological sequence data began to be shared.  Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data. The development of bioinformatics as a field is the result of advances in both molecular biology and computer science over the past 30–40 years. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combines biology, computer science, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret biological data.  The key areas of bioinformatics include biological databases, sequence alignment, gene and promoter prediction, molecular phylogenetics, structural bioinformatics, genomics, and proteomics.