Understanding
the fabric of life: pattern-searching pays off for Phoebe Chen
Bioinformatics is the information science of biology. It is the application of mathematics, statistics, computational science and information technology (IT) to problems and questions in molecular and genomic biology.
“In the last decade, animal, human and plant genomes have been sequenced,” said Associate Professor Phoebe Chen of Deakin University’s Faculty of Science and Technology.
“This means we have knowledge of the genetic code of particular species. However, we still don’t understand what this information means – there is an enormous amount of data in the genetic code of any organism, a lot of it may be what we call junk DNA.
“Our research develops tools to understand the fabric of life, we look for patterns in the genetic code and try and make sense of those patterns.”
Professor Chen’s work has been recognized well outside the boundaries at Deakin.She is a chief investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics, which also includes researchers from the University of Queensland, the Australian National University, Macquarie University and the University of Newcastle. The Centre has recently been re-funded following an announcement by the Minister for Education, Science and Training, the Hon. Julie Bishop MP, in which she awarded an additional $67.6 million over three years for high-performing research centres. Professor Chen will receive $240K to carry out research from 2008-2010.
She will lead a world-class bioinformatics project to understand how genetic information is translated into the physical and functional characteristics of mammalian cells, and also to develop and improve the techniques used in bioinformatics. The project uniquely brings together genomic and post-genomic bioinformatics, complex systems research and experimental phenomics to produce a deep understanding of how information in the genome is transformed into structure and function in the mammalian cell.
The research has long term relevance to improving human health.
“We can use the type of knowledge
developed through bioinformatics research to recognise genetic information
which may identify the risk of people developing particular diseases,”
said Professor Chen.
“For example, recent research by the Centre looking for patterns
in genomic data demonstrated that in a prostate cancer gene expression
dataset, 72.7% of patients with the disease had three pieces of genetic
code in common but this was not the case in healthy controls.
“In the future, this type of knowledge may be useful in identifying at risk individuals, so that prevention and screening programs can be put in place, and the disease managed at early rather than late onset, improving the chances of success.
“I am also committed to building critical mass and research excellence here at Deakin. It is all about excellence.”
Professor Chen has two postdoctoral research fellows and five current PhD students involved in the bioinformatics research program at Deakin.