Bioinformatics - BIOINFORMATICS

John Archer (P.I.) has over 12 years of bioinformatics software development experience which has resulted in the production of numerous tools actively used within the research community. Similarly, Antonio Munoz has been active for 10 years in the field of bioinformatics and has been instrumental in the development of the sma3s annotation tool (http://www.bioinfocabd.upo.es/node/11) which is currently in the process of becoming a leading tool in the field. The co-operative efforts of both members will be fundamental to the future success of the group in relation to teaching, research, grant writing, student supervision and the development of novel software tools relevant to bioinformatics.

The main short-term objective is to foster the bioinformatics capacity of InBIO so that it is internationally competitive in the field. Both members contribute to this goal through:

(1) teaching advanced courses on the PhD program BIODIV (Biodiversity, Genetics and Evolution), and on the postgraduate course in bioinformatics;

(2) contributing to fundraising;

(3) assisting researchers at InBIO on a daily basis with their bioinformatics requirements;

(4) putting into place the hardware framework required for modern day bioinformatics analysis.

Training has been a continued activity of the group, involving the development of a teaching framework. Courses so far include:

(i) A Masters module covering the topic of next-generation sequencing and data analysis;

(ii) Programming in Pear;

(iii) Programming in Java.

The main long-term objective is to bring InBIO to the forefront of bioinformatic tool development within the international research community. This will be done through the development of ground breaking tools and pipelines in the areas of transcriptomics, annotation and de novo assembly, all of which are directly relevant to many of the other research groups that exist within InBIO.