Bioinformatics is mostly about translating and searching in big chunks of data.
You'll need to study genetics, and also some computer skills, a couple of programming languages will help a lot.
some links to taste the waters:
Perl is one of the weapons of choice to find things inside big strings of text: http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/Main_Page
Not the only tool in the city, of course:
http://biopython.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.biolisp.org/
if you want to use lisp, you'll probably will find useful to be able to use perl regexes in lisp, several candidates here, but cl-ppcre and optima are popular