<正>２０世纪的生命科学研究对人类科学、文化、经济、政治和生活等各方面产生了极大的影响。尤其是人类基因组计划（ＨＧＰ）的提出和实施，不仅带动了自然科学和人文社会科学的交叉与融合，而且推动了许多高新技术的发展和新兴学科的产生。分子生物学、计算生物学、计算机科学和信息技术等学科的交叉和融合产生的生物信息学（Ｂｉｏｉｎｆｏｒｍａｔｉｃｓ）的形成和发展，对全球范围内广泛开展的各物种的基因组学、未来的后基因组学以及包括新药开发在内的新兴生物技术产业的发展等多个领域将产生重大影响，是２１世纪生命科学和新兴生物技术发展的基石。然而，生物信息学毕竞是一门十分年轻的学科，还带有相当明显的计算生物学的印记。笔者认为，生物信息学的内容应该从涵盖生命本质的遗传信息（生物信息流）的流动、传递、储存与复制、表达、重组的角度来全面解读。因此，笔者对生物信息学这门崭新学科的相关基本概念、研究内容、目标、现状和发展进行了评述。

Sciences, culture, economics, politics, and daily life was widely effected by the research progresses of life science in the 20th century. Especially in the later of 80’s in the 20th century, with the remarkable initiation and bringing into effect of Human Genome Plan and Other species genome plan, the nature science and society science was going to have more and more common joints with more new high sciences and technologies was born. Bioinformatics was one of them, by crossing and intergrating with molecular biology, computing biology, computer science and information science. The molecular data of organisms have been producing and increasing exponentially. Molecular biologists need the modern computer and network technology to organize and use those data. Bioinformatics will be playing an important role and take important effect on each species genomics, post-genomics and new drug development. Bioinformatics would be the foundation stone of life science in the 21st century. However, Bioinformatics was immature and it might be totally understood through the genetic information flow, and its storage and copying, expressing, recombination. The releted basic concept, research contents, aim and devolopment of this new subject were summarized in this paper.