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It is still premature to speak about life sciences as a theoretical scientific discipline. The extrapolation depth is small due to the fragmentary knowledge in a vast space of the unknown. Incremental accumulation of data as a result of hypothesis-driven experiments and observations is still the major source of new insight. Nevertheless, there are a few increasingly important research areas where the application of quantitative, mathematical concepts has become instrumental for the discovery of new biomolecular mechanisms and for progress in biological theory.
This development has been fuelled by the emergence of high-throughput experimental techniques (such as DNA sequencing, microarray techniques, etc.). As a result, researcher can, for the first time, generate so much data that, essentially, the aim of describing living organisms in their totality has become realistic. Yet, the deluge of data is without understanding in terms of biomolecular mechanisms that link genome information and phenotypes. Computational biology has entered a new era characterized by the availability of fully sequenced genomes, as well as increasingly complete gene expression and proteomics datasets that wait for functional interpretation.
The Bioinformatics Institute, which was founded by Dr. Gunaretnam Rajagopal in 2001 and led by myself since August 2007, is on its way to becoming a notable contributor of biologically relevant results and new, efficient computational biology methods to the world-wide scientific effort in the search for yet unknown biomolecular mechanisms, an effort with the goal of applications in medicine and biotechnology.
The Institute carries out research in the areas of
- biomolecular sequence analysis for the prediction of molecular and cellular functions (including the biochemical verification of hypotheses on function)
- biomolecular structure modeling and ligand design
- gene expression profile analysis at the transcript and proteome levels
- automated analysis of microscopic pictures from cellular systems (imaging informatics)
The Bioinformatics Institute has developed and deployed analytical tools and computational techniques for biology research in house and through close collaborations with experimental and clinical groups within and outside the Biopolis and Singapore. The members of our institute are united in making this effort a success and I invite you to join us in this endeavour that will open new frontiers in biology for the benefit of mankind.
Dr. Frank Eisenhaber
Director
Bioinformatics Institute
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