Faculty Research

Laurence H. Baker Center for Bioinformatics and Biological Statistics and the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) Program at Iowa State University (ISU) have members who are a diverse group of highly interactive scientists. They are enthusiastic about the challenges and opportunities presented by modern quantitative biology. These scientists have expertise in the following interdependent research areas:

• Bioinformatics - includes ISU faculty who apply the information and statistical techniques to integrate data from research in genomics, molecular evolution and macromolecular structure/function relationships to provide understanding of biological systems at new levels of complexity.
• Functional Genomics - including genomics initiatives on plants, animals and microbes. These scientists are producing a prodigious quantity of sequence and expression data that has opened up new avenues of biological inquiry.
• Genome Informatics and Evolution - includes ISU faculty with expertise in gene analyses and molecular evolution with emphases on understanding patterns and processes of change occurringamong genes and among genomes over time.
• Macromolecular Structure and Structural Genomics - includes ISU faculty with research aims to discern structural and functional meaning from DNA, RNA, saccharide and protein sequences. Recently a new initiative to uncover the structures in plant cell walls has been initiated.
• Systems Biology - include faculty extracting reliable information from combinations of high-throughput expression and proteomics data, genomic and structural information.