Bioinformatics is a diverse field that covers topics from medicine to computer science. Multidisciplinary to its core, Bioinformaticians have backgrounds in math, CS, physics, molecular biology, medicine, and more, and SeRC’s Bioinformatics community reflect this diversity. Inspired by a SeRC call for collaborative projects, the community has decided to join forces in a common project, where the basis is protein domain evolution. Most proteins have a very clear modular architecture of so called domains, essentially recurring sequence patterns or substructures.
One aim of this project is to produce tools that explicitly models how domains evolve within proteins. The new models and software will be applied to selected protein families that will also be studied in other ways by the project members. Within the community project they foresee collaboration with other communities including the Visualization and Parallel and Distributed Computing communities.