An Overview of Bioinformatics Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

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 highthroughput 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.