Nature of biological data

The biological data sets are intrinsically complex and are organized in loose hierarchies that reflect our understanding of the complex living systems, ranging from genes and proteins, to protein-protein interactions, biochemical pathways and regulatory networks, to cells and tissues, organisms and populations, and finally the ecosystems on earth. This system spans many orders of magnitudes in time and space and poses challenges in informatics, modeling, and simulation equivalent to or beyond any other scientific endeavor. A notional description of the vast scale of
complexity, population, time, and space in the biological systems.

Reflecting the complexity of biological systems, the types of biological data
are highly diverse. They range from the plain text of laboratory records and literature publications, nucleic acid and protein sequences, three-dimensional atomic structures of molecules, and biomedical images with different levels of resolutions, to various experimental outputs from technology as diverse as microarray chips, gels, light and electronic microscopy, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR),X-ray crystallography and mass spectrometry.