Bioinformatics encompasses a wide range of approaches, techniques and philosophies, and the chem. engineer has an opportunity to make a significant impact both by working in areas with biochem. engineering and by working in collaboration with colleagues from the life sciences, computer science and applied mathematics. A few of the problems within the realm of bioinformatics and genomics currently being studied by the chem. engineering community are anal. of biochem. pathways, manuf. of devices for small-scale operation, optimization of RNA batch reactions, prediction of protein folding, and modeling metab. functions. [on SciFinder (R)]