Introduction

The Bioinformatics Group is headed by Professor David Jones, and was originally founded as the Joint Research Council funded Bioinformatics Unit within the Department of Computer Science at University College London. The Unit has now been fully integrated into the department and now forms one of 8 Research Groups. The group's main aim is to develop and apply state-of-the-art mathematical and computer science techniques to problems now arising in the life sciences, particularly those now appearing in the post-genomic era. The interdisciplinary research is closely linked with the UCL Centre for Mathematics and Physics in Life Sciences and Experimental Biology (CoMPLEX), and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, though we also maintain and encourage links to other UCL departments. The group also forms the research core of the Bloomsbury Centre for Bioinformatics , which is a joint Research Centre between UCL and Birkbeck College and which also provides bioinformatics training and support services to biomedical researchers at both universities.

The group occupies dedicated space within the Department of Computer Science, and makes full use of the available Departmental computing facilities, along with joint access to a 170-CPU Beowulf Cluster housed within the Department. The group also maintains some dedicated computing facilities of its own to allow maintenance of specialized biological databases and public access to the software and methods developed within the group.

Group Research

Our new beta server is now available. Please help us test our new server architecture. The links below will take you to our new servers. If you are having problems with the new service or you would prefer not to use the new servers, the old servers remain available at the usual URLs. Please be patient with any minor teething problems as the new service is deployed. If you discover any problems or bugs with the new servers please send these to us at psipred@cs.ucl.ac.uk PSIPRED Including the new memsat-svm and pdomTHREADER algorithms DomPred DISOPRED Metsite. New
Protein Structure Prediction Threading (THREADER) Ab initio folding simulations Protein disorder prediction (DISOPRED) Protein domain prediction (DomPred) Database of protein disorder (DisoDB)
Protein Sequence Analysis Protein function prediction NEW Metsite: Metal binding residue prediction. NEW Amino acid substitution matrices Hidden Markov Models (collaboration with N. Goldman, Cambridge, & J. Thorne, NCSU)
Genome Analysis Genomic Threading Database (GTD) Genomic fold recognition (GenTHREADER) Genome annotation using software agents
Protein Structure Classification Comparison of structure classifications (CATH/SCOP/FSSP) CATH (collaboration with J. Thornton & C. Orengo, UCL Biochemistry)
Transmembrane Protein Modelling MEMSAT Folding In Lipid Membranes (FILM) NEW
De novo Protein Design Methods
Biological Applications of Data-mining and Machine Learning Techniques Information extraction for biological research (BioRat)
Microarray Analysis Data integration for microarray analysis Data visualization
Systems Biology Systems biology applied to stem cells

This page last modified 23 July, 2009 by David Jones.