Basically, it just means in a computer/by a computer program. You’re modeling things virtually, not physically doing stuff with your hands at the bench. But the virtual modeling can help you come up with and/or narrow down hypotheses to test in vitro (those bench experiments). Examples include: prediction of protein structures; in silico screening of drug compounds to predict if they might bind a protein; molecular docking to see how molecules might bind one another; molecular dynamics to model how molecules wiggle; and sequence analysis to predict off-target binding sites for CRISPR guide RNAs.

In silico experiments are “dry lab” work – they don’t directly involve “wet lab” physical experiments, but they typically rely on data from such wet lab work, often collected by lots and lots of scientists and stored in large public databases.

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