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| Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics |
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A
collaborative effort between the Divisions of
Biology and Physical Sciences,
an initiative in Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics will promote a new interdisciplinary
area of science at UCSD. This initiative will
develop new computational and experimental methods capable of extracting relevant
pieces of biological information from genomic and other biological data. These
new methods will include (1) microarrays, or “DNA chips,” that allow
scientists to analyze the complex interactions of hundreds of genes at once; (2)
high-throughput techniques for the analysis of protein-protein interactions; and
(3) proteomics, the identification and determination of the functions of the proteins
encoded by the genes. The development of these new methods is expected to accelerate
the rate of problem-solving in biology by as much as 1,000 fold and will form
the basis for two research thrusts at UCSD: Bioinformatics, the mining of biological
information with computational tools, and Functional Genomics, the predictive
biology that comes from the knowledge of all of the genes, proteins, and other
parts of an organism. Both of these areas will have a tremendous impact upon future
scientific understanding of cellular functions, evolutionary biology, regulatory
networks, and the molecular basis of disease. Moreover, the technologies developed
in these two areas should lead to the generation of novel therapeutics, patient-specific
designer drugs, and customized proteins with novel biological structures and functions.
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Research Initiatives
