Timeline of FMs in bioinformatics and their background in deep learning. The emergence of FMs in bioinformatics coincided with the ascent of deep learning, gaining significant momentum as these models showcased remarkable advancements in the era of big data. Landmark achievements such as Alpha Go, the first robot to meet top standards, significantly enriched the landscape of deep learning. Subsequent developments, exemplified by AlphaFold and AlphaFold2, revolutionized protein structure prediction from biological sequences. The introduction of GPT4 marked a pivotal moment, catalyzing a surge in the application of FMs. These strides propelled FMs (including discriminative FMs and generative FMs) in bioinformatics to acquire salient information for practical applications in biology.