Bioinformatics Research Group

The UNCW Bioinformatics Research Group is dedicated to the creation of useful, flexible software to help bench scientists, students, and non-specialists find the answers to biologically significant questions.  Our current focus is on whole-known-genome and inter-genome analysis of plant DNA sequences.

Computers are becoming a critical part of biology. Massive automation was key to sequencing the human genome; now, in order to understand our DNA sequence or do anything useful with it, even more computing power is needed. However, most biologists aren't trained as computer scientists. It isn't realistic to expect a bench scientist to start writing programs in order to analyze their data; today, bioinformatics is only practiced by specialists.

We are currently working on several approaches to the problem of making biological software easy enough for biologists to use but flexible enough to be useful. Biological data is migrating into relational databases, but the database language SQL is hard to learn. Our client software lets biologists ask analytical questions more complex and more powerful than database queries by graphically stringing together small functions. Experience with a prototype system demonstrated to our biologists that "you can't solve interesting problems on the desktop," so our development has been folded into the GridNexus project to provide the same user interface on top of the distributed computing power of a Grid.