Bioinformatics computation of metabolic models from sequenced genomes

In the early days of the human genome project (HGP), during the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was skepticism that the genome project would produce biologically meaningful information. The reality is that bioinformatics has allowed us to extract far more biology from sequenced genomes than any published predictions in the early 1990s. Thanks to the efforts of many researchers in several subfields of bioinformatics, we can now process a sequenced genome through a series of computations to produce a quantitative metabolic flux model. Thus, surprisingly, bioinformatics has achieved what might have been held up as a holy grail of the field, before the goal was even articulated.