Mission of the Group

The mission of the group is to develop software solutions and implement approaches that allow researchers in the life sciences to analyse and interpret their experimental results, in the context of what is already known in their biological domain of interest. The challenge is to design software that is sufficiently intuitive for the average biologist to use. Therefore we:

develop tools and resources for biologists
provide knowledge in ‘one-stop shop’ for domain biologists
build an integrated platform for ‘Knowledge Management’
demonstrate the use of semantic systems biology
promote the use of, and participate in systems biology projects

Main Activities

Our main activities are:
- The development of the semantic knowledge base BioGateway. To enhance the use of this resource we have now developed a Cytoscape App that enables a user to easily draft queries with results presented in the form of a network.
- The systems medicine projects COLOSYS / DrugLogics, where we use logical modeling software to simulate the response of cancer cells to targeted drugs that inhibit cell proliferation. This approach requires models that are either curated/hand-built or automatically assembled from causal statements.
- The development of a standard for the annotation of causal interaction statements, for the assembly of logical models.
- The organisation of GRECO and GREEKC consortia that work towards a well structured Knowledge Commons for the domain of Gene Regulation.
- Crossover projects that assess the implications and Responsible Research and Innovation dimensions of the projects above.