Crispin Miller - Overview

he group aims to provide pragmatic solutions to real biological problems arising from research within the Institute. At least initially, the majority of effort is being focused on developing an integrated microarray database to support the Cancer Research UK Affymetrix system housed within the Paterson’s Molecular Biology Core Facility.

We are particularly interested in dealing with the 'omic explosion' arising from high throughput techniques, and the corresponding need to integrate the different data-types that they provide - so that each may offer analytical context to its peers. The group is developing an integrated database and associated analysis tools operating on information extracted from a variety of sources including sequence, pathway, interaction, literature, proteomics and expression. We are focusing, at least initially, on the latter, in order to provide data analysis and handling for the Paterson’s Affymetrix system, and are committed to supporting the newly emerging standards (such as MIAME and MAGE) being developed by the microarray community. Much of this work is being done using standard IT tools developed for building web applications, databases and e-commerce systems.

A key issue to address is the need to further integrate mouse, yeast and human models, all of which are actively worked on within the Institute, and with the imminent arrival of the complete mouse genome sequence, it is likely that is area will be pursued vigorously. Part of the group's remit is to provide access to Bioinformatics expertise through a limited number of short collaborations (e.g. development of novel tools for polymorphism studies in heterogeneous DNA; analysis and design of microarray experiments; and functional characterisation of novel gene products), and it is expected that some of these will be sufficiently interesting and difficult to be spun out into longer term projects.