Over the past few decades, major advances in the field of molecular biology, coupled with advances in genomic technologies, have led to an explosive growth in the biological information generated by the scientific community. This inundation of genomic information has, in turn, led to an absolute requirement for computerized databases to store, organize, and index the data and for specialized tools to view and analyze the data. As a result, the field of Bioinformatics, an interdisciplinary field at the junction of several disciplines ranging from biology to mathematics to computer science to information technology, has evolved.

Bioinformatics can be broadly described as having applications in at least one of the following four processes:

• Storing, annotating and analyzing DNA sequences from various genomes.
• Aligning similar proteins and generating phylogenetic trees to examine evolutionary relationships
• Clustering proteins into families and the development of protein models
• Structural and functional characterization of various protein and RNA samples

With the endless influx of biological data in somewhat overwhelming proportions, data mining and knowledge discovery has become critical to exploring and analyzing these large data sets by automatic or semi-automatic means in order to discover meaningful patterns and rules. Data mining is now an integral part of the broad field of bioinformatics that brings together statisticians, computer scientists and biologists to identify patterns and relationships that are not obvious in large and complex biological data sets.

The Center for Orthopaedic Research bioinformatics team is developing efficient bioinformatics tools to enable state-of-the-art proteomics research, focused on SELDI and microarray analysis tools for investigators on the UAMS campus.

Selected Publications

• Diagnosis of pancreatic cancer using serum proteomic profiling: Oct. 2004
• Tumor-derived interleukin-8 stimulates osteolysis independent of the receptor activator of nuclear factor-kappaB ligand pathway. Cancer Research 65:11001-11009, 2005

Staff

• Larry Suva, PhD - Director
• Charity Washam, MSc - Proteomics data analysis
• Tony Bacon - Finite Element Analysis of Human Bone
• Eric R. Siegel, MS - Biostatistics consultant