This research area focuses on understanding information processing in biological systems.
This research area focuses on understanding information processing in biological systems. It involves the development of novel computational techniques to model and analyse biological data and biological systems.
This area is highly interdisciplinary. It recognises novel technical computer science challenges in retrieving and analysing biological data and the computational modelling of biological systems, including systems and synthetic biology, and neuroinformatics and computational neuroscience.
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Medical Research Council (MRC) and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) support the wider field of bioinformatics research.
We will continue to support research into novel computational modelling, which enables information processing relevant to biological systems. This area is inherently cross disciplinary, with close links to the following research areas:
- artificial intelligence technologies
- information systems
- mathematical biology
- statistics and applied probability
- synthetic biology.
Projects must be driven by computer science and or mathematics and statistics; no more than half of the intended work should be in the biological and or biomedical application domains. Research on either or both the development or translation of bioinformatics tools is a lower priority for funding; we expect the development or translation of such tools to become increasingly integrated with novel biological science research.
We aim to meet four goals.
Be a cross-disciplinary area of research
We aim to support the wider field of bioinformatics as supported by BBSRC, MRC and NERC and that researchers in this area can contribute to. Biological informatics will be a successful cross-disciplinary area through collaboration with researchers from other areas.
Support novel computational modelling
We support the novel computational modelling aspects of biological informatics, which are very important to systems biology research and complement and support the synthetic biology research area. The synthetic biology roadmap demonstrates the importance of biological informatics to the UK.
Make significant contributions to data science
Our portfolio in this research area also aims to contribute to the data science agenda, and the retrieval and analysis of data in biological systems, through the use of novel computational tools and models.
Monitor interest in neuroinformatics
We will continue to monitor what appears to be growing interest in exploiting advances in neuroinformatics for the design of neural computing, microelectronics, system architectures and autonomous systems, which may tie into the developing area of human-like computing.
Biological informatics research will play a role in delivering the objectives of EPSRC’s data enabled decision making cross-information and communication technology (ICT) priority. To maximise the impact of these contributions, researchers should link to the other related research areas mentioned above.