Bioinformatics

• Current number of academic staff: 52, with six in the Algorithms and Bioinformatics group, and numerous collaborators elsewhere in the College.
• Current number of research students: 4.
• Recent publications
• Population-based local search for protein folding simulation in the MJ energy model and cubic lattices;
• A fast and efficient algorithm for mapping short sequences to a reference genome;
• A hybrid approach to protein folding problem integrating constraint programming with local search;
• Module detection in complex networks using integer optimisation; Transcriptome map of mouse isochores.
• Current research projects:
• Biological network inference and classification;
• Genome sequence analysis and annotation;
• Normalisation algorithms for microarry data;
• Protein-protein interaction networks.
• Partner organisations:
• EBI (Cambridge),
• NIMR (London),
• UCL (London). 

Bioinformatics is the application of computational methods in the representation and analysis of biological data. The availability of data from genome sequencing and high-throughput measurements in the human and other biological species has fuelled an explosive growth of bioinformatics during the past two decades. Research in bioinformatics has the potential to steer biological discovery in genomics, medical science and pharmaceutical applications.

The Bioinformatics research activity in the Department of Informatics aims to support existing demands and anticipate exciting new developments at the crossroads of computational and biomedical science. Research activities are centred on systems biology, functional genomics and string processing applications, such as protein folding, analysis of large and complex biological networks, machine learning for property prediction, data classification for molecular signature and biomarker discovery, algorithms for next generation sequencing applications, and micro RNA target prediction. Research is supported by extensive collaborations across medical and biomedical departments within King's as well as other national and international research groups in computational and experimental sciences.