Rutgers Structural Bioinformatics Project

Research Focus

Sample Research Projects:

• Nucleic Acid Database

• Struturing Databases of Protein Structures

• Analysis for NMR Spectra with AI

Researchers

Facilities

A major component of scientific research involves the development and testing of hypotheses from large amounts of numerical and visual data, usually stored in shared databases.

Developing explicit structural representations of the knowledge needed for hypothesis formation and scientific data analysis and prediction is central to this work, and forms the core of research in the nascent field of BioInformatics. It is the emphasis on the search for systematic, structured representations of knowledge underlying biological and biochemical problem solving that distinguishes this approach from other research in biomathematics and computational biology.

We are fortunate at Rutgers to have strong collaborative research groups who are already working together in this interdisciplinary field:

• Dr. Helen Berman, Professor of Chemistry and Director of the NSF-funded Nucleic Acid Data Base, and the Molecular Biophysics Center.

• Dr. Gaetano Montelione, Associate Professor of Chemistry and head of the NMR Protein Research Group;

• Dr. Casimir A. Kulikowski, Professor of Computer Science, and Director of the Laboratory for Computer Science Research and the NIH-funded Rutgers Knowledge-Based Image Interpretation Project.

• Dr. Israel Gelfand, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, and McArthur Fellow, who together with Dr. Alexander Kister is working on the analysis of immunoglobulin structures.