Bioinformatics
The late 20th century saw revolutionary developments in biotechnology and in affordable, high-performance computing hardware. These developments have produced an exponentially growing wealth of biological data together with an expanding repertoire of software to analyse them. A new discipline, bioinformatics, emerged in the 1990s which was initially concerned with the statistical analysis of DNA and protein sequences.
Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics has since broadened to include the treatment of other biological data (e.g. structural, expression etc) and has surpassed the point at which an informed bench scientist can easily keep up with recent developments.
The unit bioinformatics service was established in August 2001 and we aim to bring state of the art methods from computational biology to unit research programs through educational activities, practical advice and collaboration. We also undertake novel research in bioinformatics inspired by research programmes in the unit.
People
- Dr Colin Semple: Head of Bioinformatics
- Philippe Gautier: Bioinformatician
- Graeme Grimes: Bioinformatician/Database Systems
Services: What we do
Collaboration: help and advice with sequence analysis
- Recommend methods and tools to solve problems
- Assist in using these methods
- Contribute to manuscripts/grant applications/interview panels
- Perform custom analysis, particularly for large-scale or complex problems
Education: Instruction in practical aspects of bioinformatics
- Biological databases
- Data retrieval using web-based tools
- Homology searching methods and tools
- Phylogenetic tree construction
- Genomic sequence annotation
Research: Original research in bioinformatics
- Computational analysis of genomic sequence data
For further information please contact: Dr Colin Semple