This application aims at developing and planning a Bioinformatics Center of Excellence in Cellular Biology. The planning aspect of the application centers on promoting interactions between a group of computational scientists and a group of biomedical scientists engaged in computation intensive biomedical research. The three development projects included are the Virtual Cell project, the Microarray project, and the Mass-Spectrometry/Proteomics project. The respective three responsible project groups collectively address a wide spectrum of research issues from cellular biology to organ physiology. Yet these groups share a very high interaction potential due to the natural relevancy amongst their respective sub-disciplines. The computational group plans to bring in a series of innovative solutions to the computational problems that each of these developmental groups has been increasingly facing. The computational needs that will be addressed are fundamental issues in biomedical research and thus the novel approaches proposed therein will address advancing not only the participating development projects but also a wider class of biomedical applications elsewhere. A second goal of the computational group is to plan and establish a high performance computing infrastructure dedicated to the proposed bioinformatics research activities. This infrastructure development will initially utilize a high-speed network to interlink existing computer hardware and software resources currently scattered around individual laboratories. It will subsequently mature into a central computing facility dedicated to bioinformatic computing. The proposed bioinformatics center will employ an ambitious plan to overhaul bioinformatics education and training programs by officering a focal point for curriculum development, student activities, seminars and workshops, postdoc training, visitors program, and sharing of computational resources. The center?s function also includes organizing annual retreats to promote interactions among researchers, managing visitors programs and internship programs with the local biomedical and pharmaceutical industry. The ultimate goal of the center is to fulfill the growing need of computation intensive biomedical research by pursuing innovation in research and at the same time training the next generation of researchers in this important multi-disciplinary field.
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