Bioinformatics Research Areas

Digital Biology Laboratory
Computer Science Department
University of Missouri, Columbia

“Solved” Problems:
DNA sequence base calling and assembly
Pairwise sequence comparison
Protein secondary structure comparison
Disorder region in proteins
Transmembrane segment prediction
Subcellular localization
Signal peptide prediction
Protein geometry
Homology modeling
Physical mapping informatics
Microarray data collection

“Developed” areas with remaining challenges:
Gene finding
Phylogenetic tree construction and evolution
Protein docking
Drug design
Protein design
Linkage analysis and quantitative traits
Gene expression clustering

数据挖掘研究院

Developing Areas:
Multiple sequence comparison and remote homolog search
Repetitive sequence analysis
Protein structure comparison
Protein tertiary structure prediction
RNA secondary structure prediction
Regulatory sequence analysis
Computational proteomics
Gene ontology and function prediction
Computational neural science and applications in various species and systems (e.g., cancer)

Emergent Areas:
Pathway (regulatory network) prediction
Computational comparative genomics
Text (literature) mining
Small RNA and anti-sense regulation 
Alternative splicing prediction
Computational metabolomics 

Possible future directions:
Genome semantics 数据挖掘研究院
Membrane protein structure prediction
RNA tertiary structure prediction
Post-translational modification
Dynamics of regulatory networks
Virtual cell/organism modeling
… (nobody knows)