About laboratory

Due to the revolution in high-throughput technologies bioinformatics became Big Data Science of Genomics. Therefore, the opening of the Laboratory of Bioinformatics at the Faculty of Computer Science is a necessary and timely event. Big Data of molecular biology already utilyze general algorithms and methods of Data science, among which the machine-learning methods demonstrate a good performance.

The main directions of educational and scientific activities of the laboratory are fundamental research in the area of DNA secondary structures and their role in genome functioning, chromatin organization and DNA-protein interactions. The laboratory works on deciphering “the code of DNA secondary structures”, which is together with the code of primary genome annotation by sequence elements (genes, exons, introns, regulatory motifs, and others) and the epigenetic code constitutes another genome annotation layer.

Also the laboratory works in the area of research of the spatial chromatin structure, how it changes in different experimental conditions and how it is connected with the epigenetic code and the code of DNA secondary structures. In particular, there are tasks of comparing different methods to determine topologically associated domains (TADs), and application of deep learning methods to find the characteristic genomic functional elements at the TAD boundaries.

Another direction of research is devoted to the determination of physical and chemical properties of DNA structures participating in protein interactions. We develop the database NPIDB – an open resource to study DNA-protein interactions, which provide a big collection of DNA-protein complexes. The resource extracts and analyzes information from the other well-known bioinformatics databases PDB, SCOP, Pfam. There is an ongoing research on classification of DNA-protein complexes and solving the problem of ascribing novel structures to the existing structural families.

Students can take an internship and get involved in active research at the early stages of their education. Laboratory collaborates with the leading bioinformatics laboratories around the world.