Cathy’s Research Interests
Systems integration is becoming the driving force for the 21st century biology. Researchers are systematically tackling gene functions and complex regulatory processes by studying organisms at different levels of organization, from genomes, transcriptomes and proteomes to metabolomes and interactomes. To fully realize the value of such high-throughput data requires advanced bioinformatics for integration, mining, comparative analysis, and functional interpretation. My group conducts bioinformatics and computational biology research and has developed a bioinformatics resource at the Protein Information Resource with integrated databases and analytical tools to support genomics, proteomics and systems biology research [Wu et al., 2003]. PIR is a member of the UniProt Consortium to provide the central international resource on protein sequence and function [Wu et al., 2006]. The PIR web site and the UniProt web site at PIR are accessible by researchers worldwide with over 4 million hits per month from over 100,000 unique sites.
Our research encompasses protein evolution-structure-function relationships, biological text mining, protein ontology, proteomic bioinformatics, computational systems biology, and bioinformatics cyberinfrastructure. The protein-centric bioinformatics framework we are developing connects data mining, text mining and ontology for functional analysis of genes and proteins in the systems biology context. The integrative approach reveals hidden relationships among the various components of the biological systems, allows researchers to ask complex biological questions and gain better understanding of disease processes, and facilitates target discovery. We will further establish a new Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at University of Delaware to foster collaborative interdisciplinary research and to offer graduate degree programs in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology to train the next generation of researchers and educators.
