Informatics for Chemistry, Biology, and Biomedical Sciences

Informatics is growing across disciplines, impacting several areas of chemistry, biology, and biomedical sciences. Besides the well-established bioinformatics discipline, other informatics-based interdisciplinary fields have been evolving over time, such as chemoinformatics and biomedical informatics. Other related research areas such as pharmacoinformatics, food informatics, epi-informatics, materials informatics, and neuroinformatics have emerged more recently and continue to develop as independent subdisciplines. The goals and impacts of each of these disciplines have typically been separately reviewed in the literature. Hence, it remains challenging to identify commonalities and key differences. Herein, we discuss in context three major informatics disciplines in the natural and life sciences including bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, and biomedical informatics and briefly comment on related subdisciplines. We focus the discussion on the definitions, historical background, actual impact, main similarities, and differences and evaluate the dissemination and teaching of bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, and biomedical informatics.