Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Services

Read about what research you can do

Research spans most research themes. About a third of principal investigators (PIs) in the School who were entered into the last Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) have used the facility over the last two years. This includes PIs, their postdocs and research students. There are also Part II and Part III (third and forth year) students, from more than one subject in the Natural Sciences Tripos, who do shorter projects involving computational biology.

Similar methods are often used by researchers in themes as diverse as infection and immunity and plant biology. Life sciences research may draw on algorithms and ideas developed in physical sciences. A few recent examples of users' work are:

• "MrBayes and PAUP were used to model the phylogenetic relationships of a) the Nematoda, establishing new and corroborating established relationships and resulting in a revised phylogeny of the whole phylum, and b) globally distributed Hepatitis B virus strains resulting in the description of a new subgenotype and novel recombinant strains and a revision of existing subgenotypes."
• "We use it for..looking at..the evolution of photosynthesis and the evolution of early life. How are thoroughbred horses related to each other? When was the first horse domesticated?..."
• "Analysis of binding sites for factors involved in the regulation of genome architecture in Drosophila."
• "Quantitative Maximum Entropy: ...the computing power.. and recent developments in Bayesian statistics have allowed processing of NMR data in more dimensions and at higher resolutions than previously possible. Biochemists are able to analyse larger and more complex proteins and compute their structures to a higher precision."
• "An automated DNA sequence assembly pipeline has been put in place to sequence multiple antibody constructs. This allows one to differentiate between antibodies that bind to the same antigen but are likely to bind different epitopes because they possess different amino acid sequences within their complementarity determining region (CDR) loops."