Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics already is, and in future will be, of great importance for pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry as well as for marine industry, for instance aquaculture. It is expected that a revolution will occur, in how to develop new products based on the knowledge obtained by advanced machine learning methods applied to data of bioinformatics.
Previously it was possible for biologists to understand their own field without a noteworthy formal background in mathematics and statistics. This has changed dramatically within the last 10 years, when international databases with DNA- and protein sequences have become essential tools in several medical and biological disciplines.
Maintenance and use of local, specialised databases is becoming a necessary tool for projects in biology, medicine, ecology and fishery which aim to be of international quality, simply because the information is present and it would be dishonest not to make use of it. This applies in particular to problems where the evolution of genomes (the total genetic sequence of individuals) and protein structures may be important in comprehension of diseases in organisms and plants as well as in their function.
However, it directly makes demands on biologists and medical scientists with respect to the understanding of mathematical models, IT and data. Especially bioinformatics data mining will be important, i.e. finding new relations in biological data. Here it is essential to understand statistical and machine learning methods, both from a mathematical and informatics point of view. Last but not least, you have to be able to interpret results in form of biological models and their relations. This makes bioinformatics a very interdisciplinary field, where mathematicians, computer scientists, medical scientists, biologists and fishery scientists have to collaborate in order to achieve top-quality results.
Participants:
Professor Tor Flå
Professor Steinar Thorvaldsen (ILP)
Norsk