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Abstract

Delivering bioinformatics power to life science researchers inevitably runs into problems of limited computing resources in the context of exponentially increasing data sources, access time, costs, lack of skills and, rapidly evolving technology and software tools with poorly defined standards. In this context the development of e-facilities to best enable collaborative research often needs to be customized to specific project applications in close cooperation with the experimentalist users and, to be concerned with the storage and management of results to allow more consistency and traceability of e-results on a broad access data mining platform.

Here we showcase an internet based eResearch platform using the PHP/MySQL paradigm for the collaborative, integrative and comparative analysis of lactation related gene sequences and gene expression experiments to support lactation research. We also illustrate how these resources are used, how they enable research by allowing meta-analysis of data and results and, how the bottom-up development of customized eResearch components can lead to the production of more generic functional software tools and eResearch environments for deployment to a larger number of biological research users working on other bio-systems.

About the speaker

Christophe Lefevre obtained a Doctorate degree in Biochemistry from the University of Montpellier France in 1984 complemented by graduate studies in information science. He went on to conduct post-doctoral research in Southern California (USC, UCSD, UCLA) from 1984 to 1989 and Japan (Tokai University) from 1990 to 1995, working on the regulation of human growth hormone gene expression and the development of algorithms and software applications for the analysis DNA, in particular for the identification of conserved functional elements in regulatory DNA regions. After leading bioinformatics software developments at Gentech, a biotechnology company in southern France from 1996 to 1999, he joined Organon AkzoNobel, a pharmaceutical company in the Netherlands, as system development manager to develop bioinformatics platforms to assist drug target discovery until 2002. He since moved to Australia, working as a senior research scientist at the Victorian Bioinformatics Consortium and collaborating with the CRC for innovative dairy products on comparative lactation genomics in a number of animal models including marsupial and monotremes species. Recently Christophe joined the Institute of Technology Research and Innovation (ITRI) at Deakin University as Associate Professor of Bioinformatics.