Laurence H. Baker Center for
Bioinformatics & Biological Statistics

Bioinformatics


Bioinformatics lies at the heart of L. H. Baker Center and the BCB group ( BCB Training Program , NSF IGERT supported). This key discipline is essential for gathering data from the various genomics initiatives and for processing it in a manner that can be interpreted to achieve a deep understanding of biological systems. In addition to DNA sequences, bioinformatics must meet the challenges presented in interpreting RNA and protein expression data as well as phenotypic data and structural information.

Faculty members are engaged in bioinformatics research at multiple levels:

  1. Biological data analyses often require comparison of information stored at different locations and in different formats. Analyses may be further confounded if these data are located on different types of databases or on heterogeneous hardware and software platforms. Intelligent, mobile software agents are being developed to facilitate information retrieval regardless of location or format.
  2. Because identifying useful information from biological data presents numerous challenges in data management, object-oriented data warehouses are being developed to overcome the storage and retrieval problems that currently tax relational databases.
  3. Interpretation of biological data requires new analytic tools. The Baker Center and BCB faculty are developing novel algorithms to tackle a variety of analytical problems, including sequence assembly, intron prediction, gene prediciton and protein structure determination. New machine learning algorithms are also being developed that can provide valuable predictive information to refine analytical approaches. These algorithms have already proven useful for identifying common features among complex data sets, such as sequence motifs and conserved sites in protein structures.
  4. Finally, Baker Center and BCB faculty are accelerating bioinformatics analyses by high performance computing. Collectively, these efforts are contributing to the molecular evolution and macromolecular structure/function studies of the BCB training group and to functional genomics projects in several ISU laboratories.

In addition, the Baker Center provides support for the NSF-NIH Computational & Systems Biology Summer Institute ( ISU CSBSI ) .