The development of such tools have been driven by the large amount of genomic and proteomic data available for a variety of organisms , including the human genome . It is simply impossible to study all proteins experimentally , hence only a few are subjected to laboratory experiments while computational tools are used to extrapolate to similar proteins . Such homologous proteins can be efficiently identified in distantly related organisms by sequence alignment . Genome and gene sequences can be searched by a variety of tools for certain properties . Sequence profiling tools can find restriction enzyme sites , open reading frames in nucleotide sequences , and predict secondary structures . Phylogenetic trees can be constructed and evolutionary hypotheses developed using special software like ClustalW regarding the ancestry of modern organisms and the genes they express . The field of bioinformatics is now indispensable for the analysis of genes and proteins .