Bioinformatics Centre (Copenhagen University)

The Bioinformatics Center conducts interdisciplinary research in bioinformatics and is in charge of a masters program in bioinformatics. The center is affiliated with the Institute of Molecular Biology within the Faculty of Science of the University of Copenhagen.

The center is headed by Anders Krogh, who pioneered the use of hidden Markov models in bioinformatics, together with David Haussler. The center further consists of six postdocs and about 17 PhD students.

There are four different subgroups in the center, each focussing on different topics:

• Micro-RNA group: micro-RNA's are small RNA molecules with important roles in regulation of gene expression. The group analyses the biology of micro-RNA's using computational methods and develop tools that are useful for experimental biologists.
• Non-coding RNA group: Many RNA molecules play a functional role in the cell that is different from the classic role of serving as a template for protein synthesis. The group works on secondary structure prediction and multiple alignment of non-coding RNA's.
• Promotor analysis group: The group develops statistical and bioinformatics methods to analyze the regulation of transcription of eukaryotic genes. This includes modelling of epigenetics, transcription factor binding sites, core promoters and transcription start sites
• Structure group: the group develops protein and RNA 3-D structure prediction methods based on graphical models and Bayesian networks, directional statistics and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.