We apply our expertise to a range of cutting-edge datasets, across genomics and epigenetics, structural biology, systems biology, and electronic health records. In addition to accelerating the discovery of new, fundamental insights into major diseases, the Centre also uses state-of-the-art visualisation principles and biomedical animation to communicate breakthroughs to new audiences. The Centre also organises a series of annual events including the VIZBI conference series, aimed at raising national and global standards for visualizing biomedical data.
Here are some examples of our latest projects in developing research tools:
Aquaria is a free web-based tool for biologists that simplifies the process of gaining insight from protein structures. This service provides 100 million model protein structures with mapping of features such as SNPs. See our article in Nature Methods for further information.
Minardo, was created as a novel layout strategy to visualise large-scale data with time profiles applied to the time-series data. Minardo has been used so far to demonstrate a Snapshot of the Insulin Cell Signalling Pathway, and Phosphoregulation of Mitosis. In future work, we plan to develop Minardo into a web-based application tool, allowing interactive visualisation and ease of collaboration.
Rondo is another tool developed with a circular layout, to enable molecular biologists to interactively explore 3D chromosome conformation data sets from a wide range of technologies, across numerous human and mouse cell lines. Rondo has been used to study genomic rearrangements in cancer. See our article in Lancet Oncology.
In 2010 we launched VIZBI: an international initiative with the goal to raise the standard of data visualisation in bioinformatics software. The VIZBI conference series brings together researchers who use visualisation to study genomes, transcripts, proteins, cells, organisms, and populations. The VIZBI website provides videos and posters from previous meetings; these resources are widely used by life scientists. A related project, VizbiPlus, aims to improve how life science is communicated by creating exemplary scientifically-accurate animations designed to inspire and educate the public about cutting-edge biomedical research.
