Bioinformatics at the Norwegian Radium Hospital

A bioinformatics environment is in the process of being developed at the Norwegian Radium Hospital. This is in part due to FUGE support, both through the National Microarray Consortium, through the Oslo part of the FUGE bioinformatics national platform , through FUGE support for clinical bioinformatics at the Norwegian Radium Hospital, as well as through EMBIO support.

Our bioinformatics is at present for a large part centered around microarray bioninformatics, as a number of the people involved participate in the Microarray core facility at the Radium Hospital. We have developed novel algorithms for many aspects of microarray bioinformatics.

We internationally established the role for text mining approaches for microarray analysis, exemplified with the PubGene solution, and are further exploring full text text mining, as well as other aspects of text mining for bioinformatics (check for instance out our FigSearch searching facility for finding and organizing figures from scientific papers).

Furthermore, we have developed algorithms for DNA denaturation calculations (such as the stitch profile algorithm and service, and have participated in the completion of the human genome melting map.

We are also working within clinical bioinformatics, with an aim to provide interfaces between the clinician and the molecular biologist in the pursuit of clinically relevant molecular biology. We are also addressing human DNA variation aspects, such as the development of the Norwegian SNP database web site.