Crop Bioinformatics

The professorship Crop Bioinformatics as part of the institute for 'Nutzpflanzenwissenschaften und Ressourcenschutz' in the agricultural faculty at the university Bonn deals with bioinformatic analysis of genomes from agricultural crops. The group focus on the development of methods for protein fuction annotation.

Crop Bioinformatics (CBi)

(Comparative) Genome analysis and tomato genome projekt
Protein function annotation using phylo genomic methods
Data integration and knowledge representation in distributed, service-oriented networks

Within the tomato genome project the group is involved in the evaluation of new genome sequences (gene prediction, annotation), implementing and calculating automated evaluation procedures. Scientific evaluations in comparison to other genomes are done. A close relation of (3), data integration and knowlede representation results in the development of the phenotype database as well as the cross-linking of the single project databases.
To predict functions of new proteins sequences, e.g. within the genome projects of Medicago truncatula or tomato, the bioinformatic workflow Phylofun was implemented calculating phylogenetic trees and using them as bayesian networks to map known functions to unknown proteins. Results of the function annotation are retrievable in the AFAWE database.
The professorship Crop Bioinformatics does research and development in technologies for networking and integration molecularbiological data and resources. Within the EU projects "PlaNet", EUSOL and the international biomoby projects Prof. Dr. Heiko Schoof was already significantly involved in the fundamental research. The goal is it to develop flexible and quick solutions for data mining projects evolving from cooperations. In order to achieve that the group focuses on different areas. This includes the further development of the technology of Webservices. The technology enables different databases and compute serveres to directly and automatically communicate. The user can use a single searchportal that continously collects up-to-date information of different databases via web services. The web services can also be used to combine analysis and to automatically run a pipeline of steps using various numbers of input data. Using Taverna hunderts of web services can be combined to pipelines. In parallel we build data- and calculation services within the cross-linked plattform and develop software applications for bioinformatic analysis. The further development of standardized data models and formats and the usage of semantic web technologies for semantic description of biological knowledge in electronically processible form completes our work in this context.