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Financing: BELSPO (BELSPO)
Project reference Nr.: P6/25
Start: 2007-01-01
End: 2012-03-31
Project website: http://www.kuleuven.be/biomagnet/
Description:
During the last decade, biology has faced a technological revolution with the development of high-throughput methods for the characterization of genome sequences, transcriptome, and proteome, giving rise to unprecedented amounts of biological data. However, this technological revolution is only beginning to result in a scientific revolution, and we are still far from understanding the function of any genome, even for the simplest and best-characterized model organisms. Beyond the problems of the relatively low quality of high-throughput data, an important obstacle is the inherent complexity of biological processes, whose emerging properties cannot be understood from the simple sum of individual component properties. The field of dynamical modeling has a long tradition of analyzing complex systems, but has generally been restricted to small networks with parameters characterized at a high resolution. The integration of genome, transcriptome, and proteome data into dynamical models of biological processes represents one of the main challenges of current bioinformatics. The aim of this network is to bring together expertise ranging from high-throughput data analysis and reverse engineering to dynamical modeling with the goal of bridging the gap between the domains and serve as an enabler for systems biology. The approaches and software tools developed by the respective teams will be combined for an integrative analysis of a few carefully selected model systems.
Benefits of the network include (1) sharing of methods and complementary experience between groups traditionally involved in the complementary fields of genome annotation, analysis of omics data, and dynamical modeling; (2) development of a conceptual and practical (software) framework for the integration of genomics, bioinformatics, and modeling approaches; and (3) strengthening of the position and visibility of Belgium in this active research domain. Furthermore, the network will be leveraged to increase the quality of the training of our Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers
SMC people involved in the project:
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