About Us

The Discovery Bioinformatics Group, formed in 2005, focuses on developing bioinformatics databases and analysis tools and their application to biological discovery. Our projects are related to the response of living organisms to various stress factors. Living organisms respond to the changes in external and internal environments and adapt to a variety of conditions. Homeostasis, the state of internal equilibrium of the organism, is maintained through regulatory and defence mechanisms, including various regulatory networks and immune responses. The stress factors include biotic (e.g. challenge by pathogens, or envenomation), abiotic (e.g. extreme temperatures, dehydration, or exposure to toxic level of chemicals), or combined (e.g. allergies or tumours).

The Discovery Bioinformatics Group develops enabling technologies (biological databases and computational modelling of biological systems), validates discoveries using experimental approaches (with collaborating organisations), and aims at practical applications (e.g. improved foods, diagnostics, and therapies). The major collaborators include the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics and School of Land and Food Sciences, University of Queensland (Prof. Kaye Basford); Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R), Singapore (Judice Koh, Menaka Rajapakse and Guanglan Zhang); Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, US (Prof. J. Thomas August); Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary (Prof. Andras Falus); Flinders Medical Centre, Adelaide (Prof. Nikolai Petrovsky); and the European ImmunoGrid Consortium.

The three main interdisciplinary research themes are:

1. Enabling technologies - databases and computational modelling. We are applying data warehousing methodology for storage, retrieval, integration, and analysis of biological data for the discovery of knowledge from multiple sources. We aim to improve efficiency of biomedical research through discovery of knowledge hidden in large amounts of biological data and computational simulation of laboratory experimentation for selection of key experiments.
2. Applications to immunology and medicine - study of immune system and discovery of vaccines and immunotherapies. The study topics include infectious diseases, cancers, allergies, and autoimmunity. We focus on improving diagnostics and therapeutic intervention through immunomics - a large scale approach to immunology which combines bioinformatics, genomics, proteomics, instrumentation, as well as basic and clinical immunology.
3. Functional characterisation of bioactive peptides and proteins. The topics include functional annotation of abiotic stress-related proteins in plants, of allergens, and of bioactive peptides such as venom-toxins. The applications target the improvement of a) foods and crops, b) diagnostics techniques, and c) therapeutical approaches using bioactive peptides.