For an overview, read the DoE's primer: http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/publicat/primer/toc.html http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human

For an overview, read the DoE's primer: http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/publicat/primer/toc.html http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/publicat/... The U.S. Department of Energy does a surprising amount of research on genetics and bioinformatics. The reason: while the Manhattan project was running, DoE scientists were aware that radioactive weapons would cause amazing and lasting damage, but really didn't know much about how radioactivity would affect living things specifically. So a parallel project was set up to study the effects of radiation on cells -- e.g. selectively damaging DNA and proteins and watching what happens to the organism. Research continued after the Manhattan project ended, and eventually led to the Human Genome Project. Another resource you should definitely be familiar with is NBCI: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ Yes, algorithms are an important area of research. Caveat: it's entirely driven by biology. For example, aligning two partially matching protein sequences requires a clever algorithm. Sounds like diff, right? The catch is, related sequences don't match particularly well until you take into account which transformations are more likely to occur in nature, which takes significant biochemistry to determine and use properly. So really, your best bet is to associate yourself with a university of some sort, since that's where most of the molecular biologists tend to hang out. Learn biology first, and you'll pick up algorithms in the process.