Description of the activity
Life sciences have experienced a revolution in the last twenty years with the development of high-throughput technologies that opened-up a global vision and made feasible the dissection of the fundamental mechanisms of life to an unprecedented scale. Over the years a variety of sequencing applications have been introduced for genome-wide protein localization, mutations and sequence variant identification, transcriptome characterization and gene expression profiling, chromatin accessibility and interaction, methylation state and new so-called omics applications are continuously developed. The role of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology is to tackle data complexity to distill interpretable results and give rise to new questions and models in the description of physiology and pathological mechanisms at a molecular level. The research activity includes the analysis, integration, and interpretation of data, with the development of new tools and methods and the improvement of state-of-the-art approaches. The analyses are implemented using pipelines with the adoption of international standards to ensure reproducibility and taking advantage of high-performance computing efficiently. Besides analyzing the individual datasets, particular interest is now in their integration to find new levels of connections across data, to elucidate regulative gene networks and pathways, to help interpret the effect of genetic variations in the context of rare genetic diseases and cancer.
Involved personnel
National and International Collaborations
- Institute of biomedical technologies (ITB), CNR;
- Institute for high performance computing and networking (ICAR), CNR;
- Institute for applied mathematics (IAC), CNR;
- Istituto di Biochimica e Biologia Cellulare (IBBC), CNR;
- University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”;
- University of Naples Federico II;
- Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM);
- Institute of Molecular Oncology (IFOM).