Archives

Skolnick briefs UB Council on bioinformatics

Published: October 10, 2002

By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor

The UB Council received a lesson in "Bioinformatics 101" on Tuesday as Jeffrey Skolnick, director of the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, provided the body with a "snapshot in time" of the center and its recent activities.

Skolnick used the analogy of a car that had been disassembled—its numerous parts strewn on the floor—to explain the status of the human genome sequencing project. He likened the 30,000 genes mapped in the project to the parts of the car. "We have a collection of parts about which we know something about maybe half of them," he said. We've partly assembled the parts, but we don't know how the whole thing fits together."

The greatest challenge now in the post-genomic era, he said, is to understand the function of all genes and gene products. The long-term goal, he said, is personalized medicine—designing drugs to treat individuals according to their genetic makeup.

There are lots of ways to approach the goal, he said.

Now that the genes have been mapped and sequenced, scientists have turned their attention to proteins—the substances genes produce. They must determine what proteins do, not only on a molecular level but on a systems level as well. "In reality, proteins don't exist in isolation; they interact with each other," Skolnick said, much like the parts of the car that fit together to make up the door or the engine.

Bioinformatics—which uses the power of supercomputers to interpret data in the biological sciences at the molecular level—can help achieve this goal in a variety of ways, he said, including predicting the biochemical and physiological function of proteins, predicting protein-to-protein interactions and assigning proteins to metabolic pathways.

Skolnick noted that the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics is not the only group working in bioinformatics, so it is important that the center distinguish itself from all others working in the field. It will do so, he said, with "a unique, comprehensive, novel, structure-based approach to many key problems of computational biology that will be coupled with a broad-based dissemination effort using Web-based tools to serve the entire community."

Skolnick said he plans to make 10 faculty appointments, with the new hires being researchers experienced in such areas as protein structures, sequence analysis, metabolomics/pathways and protein-protein interactions. He called the center's seven-member Scientific Advisory Board "a real board, not a paper tiger," whose members are "real solid citizens" in the field and include a Nobel laureate and members—or soon-to-be members—of the National Academy of Sciences.

He also lauded the new Dell supercomputer cluster, which will support the work of the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics. Jokingly calling the computers "my personal cluster," Skolnick said the hardware has "created quite a stir in the world of bioinformatics and in the world of computing," making UB home of "perhaps the largest academic cluster in the world."

One of the prime objectives of the center, Skolnick noted, is to create companies and spur economic development. UB has an "unfair competitive advantage" in that regard, he said, citing the unique partnership between UB—the lead research partner in the center of excellence—and Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, the other major research partners in the center.

Moreover, members of the Scientific Advisory Board, as well as Skolnick, have had experience in starting companies. In addition, UB's Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach (STOR) is providing a "very friendly, efficient, academic environment" for technology transfer-contrary to the "barriers" frequently in place at other institutions, Skolnick said.

"In two or three years, this (center of excellence) will be the place people come to do world-class science and commercialize a significant portion of their work," he said.