CAREER: The Biological Digital Library: Information Retrieval Meets Bioinformatics

Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Brunswick NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Biological research involves synthesizing information from previous experiments with new data. Because much new biological data is in digital form, and literature describing previous research is becoming increasingly available electronically, doing biological research entirely within a computer becomes a possibility. Indeed, as the volume of data increases, using advanced computational tools as an adjunct to wet-lab experiments is crucial. This research aims to integrate biological sequence, structure and literature within a consistent framework based on relationships between biological data such as bibliographic citations (literature-literature), functional descriptions of proteins (literature-sequence), and protein sequences underlying structures (sequence-structure). The interface of bioinformatics and information retrieval is not only a ripe area for research, but also a critical area for educational development. This project involves the development of remedial materials for biology and computer science students to prepare these two different constituencies for a first course in bioinformatics. It also provides for organization of a series of workshops for computer scientists to discuss application of their work to biology. Finally, in information retrieval, faculty, students and research software have been drawn increasingly to industry, leaving a vacuum of instructional staff and materials. A new course combining material on distributed computing and information retrieval techniques is therefore planned. The system for automatically exploring connections between biological objects as well as new initiatives for graduate education in bioinformatics and information retrieval will allow biologists to investigate higher-level questions, as well as suggesting novel avenues for research based on interactions that might otherwise have been ignored. http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~nevill