Science, Technology and Engineering

O'Connor Laboratory

Department of Biochemistry

Systems and Computational Biology

We are interested in understanding the global changes associated with state changes in biological systems.  Some of our areas of investigation are:

• Changes in cellular developmental and molecular pathways during tumour formation, maintenance and spread.
• Molecular genetics of microorganism populations in rumen flora.
• Building signalling pathway-based ontologies for biological systems, particularly those pathways dysregulated in disease.
• Computational method development, including the application of purpose-built biological computing environments to our data

Post-genomic biology is rapidly becoming an information–based discipline, and today’s biologist needs the skills to use access and exploit electronic information just as urgently as laboratory-based expertise. The emerging field of Integrative Biology is gaining new insights into how biological systems work by bringing together disparate biological datasets from transcriptomic, proteomic, genomic data from disparate technologies such as gene expression microarrays, next-generation sequencing and quantitative tandem mass spectrometry.  Merging these datasets requires us not just to re-examine our reductionist thinking about biology, but to develop technical expertise in areas such as:

• Computational Biology
• Molecular Biology
• Bioinformatics
• Applied biostatistics
• Development and application of biological data standards
• Data storage, including distributed storage
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Last Updated: 7 September, 2009