Marking DNA as spam
The idea behind bioinformatics, at least for some people, is that since the information encoded into DNA is sequential, you can parse it more or less the same way that you parse an English text. You can apply a regex to DNA and you can search DNA just as you can search text. But how far can you push it?
The part of information processing science formerly known as AI developed a whole range of "machine learning" techniques. Most never made it into the real world but once in a while, a new idea is ripe and you see it spread like a storm. Most techniques that tried to model how the brain works are miserable failures, but it happens that someone understands how people use information and apply really simple pasterns turn worthless data into the most valuable repository of knowledge.