Introduction

Bioinformatics group is equipped with SGI 2400 high-performance workstation, Dell server and Legend server and set up the work environment for bioinformatics analysis. Group members are from computer sciences, mathematics, physics, biology, and are conducting research into genomics, functional genomics, and population genetics.

Research Areas

1. The platform of EST functional annotation and data mining to marine species.

Group members set up the comprehensive analysis system to store, analyze and functionally annotate a total of nearly 40,000 ESTs from 20 marine species, and construct user-friendly website for researchers.

The ESTs from the same species or the same tissue were clustered into consensus sequences and these consensus sequences are then subjected to automated annotation via similarity searches against protein and domain databases. We also implement second structure prediction, comparative genomic analysis, map to pathway network, gene ontology classification, 3D structural modeling and by integrated other knowledge source from internet.

2. Amphioxus research in genome-wide.

With the release of Florida amphioxus genome, and big bulk of expression sequences of Chinese amphioxus by use of 454 parallel-sequencing technologies, come the era of amphioxus research in genome-wide. Group member re-annotated the Florida amphioxus genome by our EST sequences and identified new gene models and defined new gene boundaries. The prevalence of alternative splicing in amphioxus is important for us to investigate the mechanism of alternative splicing evolution.

3. Human population genetics research.

With the development of research in human genome, unveiling the underlying principle of variation between different human populations has been a hotspot. Group member developed a new method based on “entropy “concept in statistical mechanics, to test the region under positive selection in human genome.