Chair of Bioinformatics

Research

Regulatory Networks

They are the key to control things in the cell. Regulatory networks are composed of specific signalling elements, their processing and effectors, for instance receptors, kinases and the actin cytosceleton in the platelet (PlateletWeb), (Boyanova et al. 2012, Blood; Wangorsch et al. 2011, BMC Systems Biology).

Also in immunity regulatory interactions, for instance between plant and attacking bacteria are critical (Nassem et al., 2012, PlantCell, in press)

We develop also new software for such modelling tasks (Philippi et al. 2009 BMC Systems Biology) and study different cell types as model systems

Boolean modeling (hepatocytes)

Metabolic Networks

Of course these are also regulated but the focus is here on the enzyme cascades, their metabolic properties and complexes they may form as well as structural considerations, e.g. which metabolites are transported, generated or consumed.

For this, we developed both tools for metabolic modelling (YANA) as well as for annotation, functional genomics (InGeno, JANE, GENOVA).

A third interest are the part of a network, since a long time we analyze regulatory RNA molecules as well as different proteins and their structure. Tools include the RNAanalyzer and the structure annotation tool AnDOM.

Current interests include siRNAs (Naseem) and lincRNAs (Dandekar) as well as structure modelling of receptors and ligands (Schaack).

A side-interest of ours is to do something good for the future with bioinformatics, that is the reason why we are interested in the SMART city (or here) movement . Other side interests is medicine in all aspects, for instance the topic aging.