An ongoing trend has been the increase in the availability of biological data, acquired by various methods and in a variety of forms. Computational biology brings together approaches and methods from several fields, including computer science, mathematics, and statistics, to interpret this information and investigate biological and medical questions.
Groups and Researchers in this Field
Machine Learning and Systems Biology
Karsten Borgwardt is a director at the MPI for Biochemistry. His research focuses on the fields of bioinformatics, biomarker discovery and personalized medicine.
In the Machine Learning and Systems Biology department, big data analysis and biomedical research meet: They develop novel data mining algorithms to detect patterns and statistical dependencies in large datasets from biology and medicine. The group is working towards two central goals: To enable the automatic generation of new knowledge from big data through machine learning, and to gain an understanding of the relationship between the function of biological systems and their molecular properties. Read more
Knut Reinert is a professor at the Free University of Berlin and a Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics. His Algorithmic Bioinformatics group focuses on development of novel algorithms and datastructures for problems in the analysis of biomedical mass data. In particular, they work on mathematical models for analyzing large genomic sequences, especially in the context of next generation sequencing, and data derived from mass spectrometry experiments, for example to detect differential expression of proteins between normal and diseased samples. Apart from modeling problems and devising efficient algorithms to solve them, the group focuses on developing free, integrated implementations of these algorithms and data structures in maintainable software libraries such as OpenMS and SeqAn. Read more
The MOSAIC Group: Scientific Computing for Image-based Systems Biology
Ivo F. Sbalzarini is a full professor on the faculty of computer science at TU Dresden, where he holds the Chair of Scientific Computing for Systems Biology in the Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD). At the same time, Ivo is also a tenured Senior Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. He is the founder and head of the MOSAIC group, which does research in scientific computing for image-based systems biology. The group exploits the unifying framework of particle methods for image analysis, numerical simulation, and model identification. Their research is mainly theoretical and computational. As they do not perform their own experiments and do not run a wet lab, they collaborate with numerous experimental groups in order to apply their methods to help advance biology. Read more
Besides being an honorary professor of computer science at the Free University of Berlin, Martin Vingron is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, where he heads the Computational Molecular Biology Department and its Gene Regulation research group. Toward a better understanding of transcriptional regulation in eukaryotes, the group works to exploit the plethora of whole-genome sequence data as well as functional genomics data on gene expression and on DNA-binding proteins which are now available. Major issues are the identification of the sequence motifs in promoters and enhancers, the interplay between epigenetic marks and regulation, and the evolution of regulatory elements. Construction of gene regulatory networks is the ultimate goal to which this information should eventually contribute. Read more
