Bioinformatics       

Biotechnology is one of the most promising industries in the 21st century and biomedical informatics is a core research area in biotechnology. Computer scientists can utilize mathematics, computer science, and biology knowledge to model biological behavior or analyze a large amount of biological data so as to extract useful information for biological research.

Since 「Human Genome Project」 was accomplished in year 2003, many countries have spent a lot of effort to gain a leadership of biomedical technology. Also, a national science program of genomic medicine has been conducted by National Science Council (NSC) in Taiwan. Thus, Yuan-Ze University (YZU) held a graduate program of BioMedical Informatics in year 2006. This graduate program not only emphasizes the training of expert in biomedical informatics but also the integration of research groups across various fields. In addition, this program enthusiastically cooperates with national hospital and medical industry for enhancing the creative capability and skill level.

According to the professional specialty of faculty in this graduate program, they are major in adopting technology of informatics and biology to investigate into gene regulatory network, computational proteomics, protein structure analysis, biomedical database, biological data mining, comparative genomics, biological text mining, and medical image. Faculty members in computer science and in biology try to find new research directions and methods in this issue through their interdisciplinary collaboration. Current bio- and medical- informatics research focuses on two areas: genomics and proteomics. In the genomics field, the main research subjects include analysis of Phalaenopsis aphrodite transcriptomes, construction of orchid genome database, and construction of gene regulatory network. In the proteomics field, the research subjects include outer membrane protein structure prediction, zinc-binding protein prediction, identification of post-translational modification, signaling network analysis, literature mining of protein-protein interaction, and 2D gel image processing.

 

        (Tzong-Yi Lee, et al., Nucleic Acids Research, 2011)