Hyderabad|India|February'2010: Under the Distinguished Lecture Series, Prof. Janet Maureen Thornton, Director, European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) Cambridge, UK gave a talk on “Bioinformatics at the Heart of Biology and Biomedicine” at the Sir C V Raman Auditorium in the University campus.

Prof. Thornton, discussed at length the Research being carried at the European Bioinformatics Institute in the frontier areas of Protein structure and functioning, Membrane Proteins with pores, Enzymes and Functional Genomics of Ageing and defined Bioinformatics as an interdisciplinary study involving Genomes, Transcriptomes, Proteins and Pathways & Systems at the heart of Biology and Biomedicine.

She cautioned that Mortality rate is declining in Industrialized Human society over the years and specified that research should focus on identifying which small molecules in the body bind to drug and to design new drug molecules to counter the emerging threats of Age related diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Osteoporosis etc., Prof. Thornton further added that, the challenges in the Bioinformatics sector pertains to generating additional data, modelling leading to more complex problems and suggested that large scale Genome Sequencing should be done and Comparative Genomics should be studied.

She appealed to researchers to focus more on Data Integration, make predictions and integrate. She opined that Image analysis will be a huge challenge in this process.

Prof. Seyed E. Hasnain, Vice-Chancellor, presided over the lecture, Prof. M. Ramanadham, Dean, School of Life Sciences welcomed the audience, , Dr. Niyaz Ahmed, Associate Professor, School of Life sciences introduced the speaker and Sri C P Mohan Kumar, Registrar, proposed Vote of thanks.

Reachout's News Bureau
February' 2010