Smart State welcomes bioinformatics brain

A visiting world expert in genomics and bioinformatics has been working with Institute for Molecular Bioscience(IMB) scientists at the University of Queensland on mapping out a strategic plan for national biological research.

Professor Mike Waterman, of the University of Southern California, was on his first visit to the Smart State.

Professor Mark Ragan, who heads IMB`s Division of Genomics and Bioinformatics, is a research colleague at the prestigious Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He said Professor Waterman was internationally recognised as “one of the fathers of genomic and bioinformatic research” and his IMB visit was a significant step toward cementing IMB`s leadership in this area.

"Our talks with Professor Waterman looked at the next 200 years of biology research, centring on the development of the new bioinformatics,” Professor Ragan said.

"This is a massive task to determine the structure, function and interactions of all the information contained in genomes.

"We intend to develop the tools to put together all this information in a form that contributes to global knowledge and assists in understanding how cells develop, grow, respond to stress and eventually die.

"Professor Waterman has professorships in biological sciences, mathematics, and computer science, and he is considered one of the very best, especially in this leading edge field that applies maths and statistics to problems in molecular biology."

IMB research programs and facilities, particularly the advanced microarray, electron microscopy and high performance super-computing facilities, will play an integral role in this research program.

Professor Waterman developed the Smith-Waterman algorithm which is still considered the “gold standard” of sequence alignment when searching for similarities, relationships and changes in DNA or protein sequences.

He also helped develop the Lander-Waterman method, a tool vital to the success of the Human Genome Project, as well as much of the early software used in genomic and bioinformatic analysis of databases.

For more information, contact Russell Griggs (07 3365 1805) or Helen Weatherley (0421 056 980).