Pulmonomics.org Website Review

Directed by Dr. Avrum Spira, the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology program at the Boston University Pulmonary Center consists of groups of Pulmonologists and Bioinformaticians involved in translational research into lung biology and disease. The long terms goals of this program are to apply and stimulate the development of post-genomic technologies and computational tools for translational research into human disease and to train physician-scientists and graduate students who can apply these tools in a clinical setting. With the complete sequence of the human and other genomes recently elucidated, we have witnessed an explosion of information and high-throughput tools that are profoundly altering biomedical research and the culture of science. The reference genomes combined with advances in the biotechnology sector have produced an exponential growth in the amount and types of data available regarding biological systems. These developments are altering the paradigm of biological research, from traditional studies of single genes or pathways to large scale studies that combine data-mining of high-throughout datasets (i.e. cDNA microarray experiments) for hypothesis generation with experimental work for validation. The reference human genome has also allowed us to rapidly characterize polymorphisms across the human population, and has also enabled molecular fingerprinting technologies that can identify the precursors and consequences of normal and Driven by this large and rapidly increasing amount of data over the last several years, the discipline of Bioinformatics has emerged whose goal is to apply the techniques from computer science, such as data manipulation and pattern discovery techniques, to solve problems in molecular biology. The field of Bioinformatics has now begun to move beyond the genome-wide study of individual biological components (i.e. genes or proteins) to integration of interactions and relationships between various components of the biological system, to provide an