Computational biology but not gene sequences?

Question

I see that this site is focused on sequencing and genomics. I'm wondering if other fields that combine computations and biology are on-topic. Such as:

• molecular dynamics simulations,
• analyzing 3d macromolecular structures (from PDB),
• proteomics.

These communities, from what I see, use primarily mailing lists to ask questions. More than a year ago there was a proteomics.SE proposal (that didn't make it like most of the proposals). I remember because at the same time I was proposing crystallography.SE. I tried hard to convince crystallographers, in particular developers of computational methods in macromolecular crystallography, to join it. Of course we were far from making it and it was just a waste of time. I read the Robert's post about chances that bioinformatics.SE will not get out of the private beta. Maybe widening the scope (to bioinformatics in the broad meaning of this word) would help?

Answer 1

I believe that that molecular dynamics and protemics are as well bioinformatics as well. it is only that we (sequencing people) dominate by numbers, therefore sequencing questions will be always predominant on any bioinformics site.

It would be awesome if there would be a community of bioinformatians doing protemics. There are even more obscure fields that could come here, like theoretical population genetics, which is largely based on explicit simulations...

I think any biologically motivated computational question / problem is appropriate.

--- edit ---

and it would be really great to get all the people here in less than a week together with at least 50 questions!

Answer 2

Any sub-field of bioinformatics should be on topic here. NGS happens to be the most popular subject among the few people who have participated so far, but that doesn't mean the site is dedicated to NGS analyses. In fact, I hope it won't be, since that would be a shame.

Personally, my main expertise is in comparative genomics and PPI networks, for example, and I've only been working with NGS for less than two years. So I am looking forward to posts about other aspects of bioinformatics.

I would consider proteomics to be absolutely on topic. Crystallography, maybe less so unless the question is about the computational aspect of it. Basically, any application of computers to answer a biological question should be on topic here as far as I'm concerned. But the site is most certainly not limited to NGS analyses, that would be a shame.