Biological Computations - May 21st, 2007

About Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics or computational biology is the use of techniques from applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, and computer science to solve biological problems. Research in computational biology often overlaps with systems biology. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions, and the modeling of evolution. The terms bioinformatics and computational biology are often used interchangeably, although the latter typically focuses on algorithm development and specific computational methods. (In the biology-mathematics-computer science triad, bioinformatics will intimately involve all three components while computational biology will focus on biology and mathematics.) Due to interest from computer scientists and mathematicians and the popularity of computational techniques in the field of genomics, it is commonly referred to as computational biology; a more accurate term is computational genomics. There are also lesser known but equally important areas of computational biochemistry and computational biophysics, that are also a part of computational biology. A common thread in projects in bioinformatics and computational genomics is the use of mathematical tools to extract useful information from noisy data produced by high-throughput biological techniques. (The field of data mining overlaps with computational biology in this regard.) Representative problems in computational biology include the assembly of high-quality DNA sequences from fragmentary "shotgun" DNA sequencing, and the prediction of gene regulation with data from mRNA microarrays or mass spectrometry.

Current Month

May. 21st, 2007 @ 02:13 pm Joint BSPR / EBI Proteomics Conference 2007

Current Location: Dover St, Manchester, UK
Current Mood: busy

I have decided to attend this years
Joint BSPR / EBI Proteomics Conference 2007 in Hinxton Cambridge (not a massivly exciting location but lots of interesting speakers)

Ruedi Aebersold is speaking which should be very interesting as I referenced a lot of his work in the review paper I wrote for CCHTS.

Rob will fund me but I could do with trying to find some travel grants from somewhere...

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May. 21st, 2007 @ 02:23 pm PMF Consensus Profiles For Cross Species Proteomics

Current Location: Dover St, Manchester, UK
Current Mood:

cheerful

Tags: consensus spectra , creatine kinase , electrophoresis , pmf , profiles , zoo gels

Well after collecting MALDI-TOF spectra last week from my "Zoo Gels" (1d SDS-PAGE Gel electrophoresis of "Rat", "Chinchilla", "Vole", "Pig", "Sheep", and "Goat" muscle protein samples) I have begun compiling the results into consensus spectra.

Looks like I can only really do it for "Creatine Kinase" at this stage because I didn't get many Mascot protein identifications, mainly because there are not many proteins sequenced for most of these species and that the samples where quite old and I'm not very sure that the spectra are of any usable quality.

Anyway it does seem to work which could mean that I will be over in Liverpool collecting lots of Peptide Mass Fingerprint data in the near future.

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