FBS
Functional Bioinformatics services
Functional bioinformatics is a team under the Advanced Bioinformatics Core (ABC). The long-term objective of this team is to integrate relevant bio- information to find the relation between genotype and phenotype. Ultimately, link the above information with clinical information in order to promote information-driven biomedical research. Besides, this team will co-develop the dry laboratory approaches for biomedical researches with non-biology teams in ABC.
To reach the above objectives, FB team will continue the services that have been provided before. These services include the bioinformatics consultation, on-line value-added databases, and off-line platform analyses for genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic approaches. In order to improve the integration of the newly formed ABC, Dr. Chuan-Hsiung Chang will transfer his disease gene discovery (DGD) service to the FB team. This team will keep improving the DGD service by incorporating the tools developed by genomic the statistics team in ABC. The other part of the DGD platform is the disease candidate gene approach. This team will keep maintaining the Spinocerebellar ataxia candidate gene database and apply this method to build candidate gene databases for other diseases. To make this approach work better, the FB team needs to expand our pathway knowledge management system by integrating public genome, transcriptome, proteome, pathway, mouse mutant, RNAi, drug, and disease information. If it is available, locally collected information will also be included. To collect more pathway information and improve the quality of contents, this team will keep running the Biological Pathway Consortium. This core will have close research collaboration with the highly heritable disease group. All the new tools or databases will be built on the common informatics platform in the ABC, so modules can be re-used by other teams.