Welcome to Bioinformatics Research Group

 

Bioinformatics is a new research area in Pakistan and COMSATS Institute of Information Technology ( CIIT ) is one of the first institutes initiating this activity. Bioinformatics Research Group ( BRG ), very young research team in the Department of Biosciences (CIIT), aims to set up Bioinformatics activity, in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL; UK) and Department of Molecular-Genetic Bases of Production Processes at Institute of Botany , Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, as well as by technical support from the software development company Softberry Inc. (USA) . This activity is supported by the financial and organizational assistance from CIIT and 2 research grants of Pakistan Higher Education Commission ( HEC ):

  1. “Setting up of Bioinformatics Research at the Department of Biosciences, COMSAT Institute of Information Technology”
  2. “Comparative Computer Analysis of Promoter Architecture and Expression Patterns of Plant Genes” (under NRPU; approved by HEC on June 04).

Main objectives of our research activity:


•  Creating a large plant-specific collection of RNA polymerase II (Pol II) promoters, studying their statistically significant characteristics and developing a novel computer tools for plant promoter prediction;


•  Creating plant-specific collections of genes with similar expression pattern and/or related to the same metabolic pathway or functional protein complex and developing computer tool for the identification of gene groups with similar expression patterns;


•  Development of Computer Tools for Prediction of Transcription Termination Regions in eukaryotic genomes;


•  Analyzing organization and expression characteristics of genes in higher plant genomes ( Arabidopsis , rice, Populus , grapevine, etc.);

Distributing promoter annotation data and analysis resources, as well as other significant data for plant genomics researchers and providing these resources on the CIIT Bioinformatics Server.