Bioinformatic tools are software programs that are designed for extracting the meaningful information from the mass of molecular biology / biological databases & to carry out sequence or structural analysis.

Factors that must be taken into consideration when designing bioinformatics tools, software and programmes are:

* The end user (the biologist) may not be a frequent user of computer technology
* These software tools must be made available over the internet given the global distribution of the scientific research community

Major categories of Bioinformatics Tools
There are both standard and customized products to meet the requirements of particular projects. There are data-mining software that retrieve data from genomic sequence databases and also visualization tools to analyze and retrieve information from proteomic databases. These can be classified as homology and similarity tools, protein functional analysis tools, sequence analysis tools and miscellaneous tools.

Homology and Similarity Tools

Homologous sequences are sequences that are related by divergence from a common ancestor. Thus the degree of similarity between two sequences can be measured while their homology is a case of being either true of false. This set of tools can be used to identify similarities between novel query sequences of unknown structure and function and database sequences whose structure and function have been elucidated.

Protein Function Analysis

This group of programs allow you to compare your protein sequence to the secondary (or derived) protein databases that contain information on motifs, signatures and protein domains. Highly significant hits against these different pattern databases allow you to approximate the biochemical function of your query protein.

Structural Analysis

This set of tools allow you to compare structures with the known structure databases. The function of a protein is more directly a consequence of its structure rather than its sequence with structural homologs tending to share functions. The determination of a protein’s 2D/3D structure is crucial in the study of its function.

Sequence Analysis

This set of tools allows you to carry out further, more detailed analysis on your query sequence including evolutionary analysis, identification of mutations, hydropathy regions, CpG islands and compositional biases. The identification of these and other biological properties are all clues that aid the search to elucidate the specific function of your sequence.