An Overview of Bioinformatics Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Terence Critchlow, Ron Musick, Tom Slezak
Center for Applied Scientific Computing
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
P.O. Box 808, L-561, Livermore, CA 94551
{critchlow, rmusick, slezak}@llnl.gov
Abstract
Depending on who you ask, bioinformatics can refer to almost any
collaborative effort between biologists or geneticists and computer
scientists - from database development, to simulating the chemical
reaction between proteins, to automatically identifying tumors in MRI
images. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), we have
come to use a slightly more restrictive definition. We consider
bioinformatics to refer to the development, application and research of
data management and data mining techniques and technology within the
domains of genomics and molecular biology. This definition includes
diverse tasks such as the creation of a database to contain protein
sequence and structure data, the integration of existing genomics data
sources into one database, the creation of databases to support
high-throughput production genome sequencing, and the automatic
construction of a model for interpreting micro-array results. This
short paper provides an overview of the history of bioinformatics at
LLNL, briefly describing the bioinformatics challenges we face, and
outlining the ongoing efforts to meet them by our bioinformatics team
and the DataFoundry research project.
Appeared in
American Biotechnology Laboratory. Volume 18. Number 9. August 2000.