Research Group SNEL

Currently science is generating information on the molecular
properties of cells and organisms at an incredible pace. For example
we know the complete genome sequence of a large number of species and
this number is increasing. Other high-throughput techniques measure
the level of expression of all genes at the same time, or measure all
the interactions between all the proteins present in a cell. These
data uniquely allow bioinformatics to make biological discoveries that
hitherto were not possible.

We use these genome scale data to perform research in
evolutionary genomics: i.e. what rules govern the presence and absence
of genes across genomes, how do protein complexes evolve, how does the
protein interaction network evolve, how do signal transduction
pathways evolve, what is the role of gene duplication in the evolution
of protein complexes and the interaction network. These research
questions are carried out using bionformatics to compare genome
sequences and integrate high-throughput data sets such as yeast-2-hybrid
data or micro-array expression data. All research efforts rely heavily
on advanced sequence analysis and orthology detection. At the same
time our insights from genome evolution and the analysis of
high-throughput data allow the development of tools to predict the
cellular function of experimentally poorly characterized genes

For a listing of specific current student projects please follow the
link to the group website. (http://bioinformatics.bio.uu.nl/snel/group.html)