Informatics

Bioinformatics reveals new gene regulation system

By comparing 140 sequenced bacterial genomes, researchers have uncovered a system for regulating genes essential to bacterial replication ?and they did it solely by computer keystrokes and mouse clicks. Mikhail Gelfand, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute international research scholar at the Institute for Information Transmission Problems (IITP) in Moscow, and his postdoctoral fellow, Dmit...

New bioinformatics technique for systematically analyzing key regions in DNA that help control gene activity

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Linnaeus Centre for Bioinformatics (LCB) at Uppsala University in Sweden have developed a new bioinformatics technique for systematically analyzing key regions in DNA that help control gene activity. The cooperative efforts were headed by Krzysztof Fidelis in the United States and by Jan Komorowski in Sweden. Understanding...

European Commission funds EBI to do new research on synergies between bioinformatics and medical informatics

In findings with implications for pandemic influenza, a new study reports for the first time that a less-virulent strain of avian influenza virus can spread from poultry to humans. The research appears in the October 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online. Crossing the species barrier is an important step in the development of a flu virus with pandemic potenti...

Virginia Bioinformatics Institutes launches microbial database

Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech have launched a publicly-available microbial database to host a range of microbial genome sequences. The VBI Microbial Database (VMD), which is described in a recent article published in Nucleic Acids Research (Vol.34, D379-D381), contains genome sequence and annotation data for the plant pathogens Phytophthora sojae and...

Pacific Rim researchers to collaborate on distributed bioinformatics analysis of avian flu

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Hawaii will use bioinformatics, grid computing and networking infrastructure, as well as collaborative ties to Asian institutions to learn more about avian flu, in hopes of helping to head off a much-feared pandemic in the region of the world where the disease has already cost human lives. "We will use modern h...

Australian wins prestigious prize in biodiversity informatics

The 2007 Ebbe Nielsen Prize has been awarded to Paul Flemons of the Australian Museum, Sydney. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) established the Prize in honor of Dr. Ebbe Schmidt Nielsen, who was an...