老司机直播

Professor Michael Brudno of the Department of Computer Science is working on software to help doctors determine a patient's risk of developing disease (photo by Norman Wong)

Decoding a deluge of data

Two 老司机直播 projects receive $1 million each for bioinformatics research

Two University of Toronto research projects have won $1 million each in funding from the Government of Canada through Genome Canada and the Ontario Genomics Institute.

The Genome Canada 2012 Bioinformatics and Computational Biology competition, a partnership with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, supports the development of the next generation of tools to deal with the large influx of data produced by today鈥檚 genomics technologies

鈥淏ioinformatics becomes increasingly important as researchers are able to generate more and more data,鈥 said Judith Chadwick, 老司机直播鈥檚 assistant vice-president, Research Services.

鈥淭ools that help us make sense of these data are the keys to better health and quality of life," Chadwick said. "On behalf of the University of Toronto, thanks to Genome Canada for these awards鈥攁nd to the Ontario Genomics Institute for facilitating them. And congratulations to the researchers on these richly-deserved awards.鈥

Professors Michael Brudno and Gary Bader received $998,546 to develop software that will help doctors use a patient鈥檚 genome to search for information about his or her risk of developing a disease.

鈥淕enome sequencing is evolving from being a research project to a routine medical test,鈥 says Brudno. He and Bader want to help clinicians interpret these tests to better target medical treatment.

The data generated when a human genome is sequenced are in the terabyte range鈥攎uch more than any human could make sense of. (A terabyte of paper stacked would make a 66,000-mile tower.) The team鈥檚 software will help distil the data down to a few megabytes of information that is actually useful. (A megabyte is roughly equivalent to 500 pages of text.)

鈥淥ften it is hard to figure out the exact type of disorder a patient has,鈥 says Brudno. 鈥淭wo disorders that look the same may have different genetic causes鈥攁nd need different courses of treatment.鈥 Sequencing a patient鈥檚 genome allows for precisely targeted treatment.

The software can also be used to help healthy patients understand their risk of developing genetic diseases such as cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer鈥檚.

The funding, half of which comes from Genome Canada, and half from the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), will allow the researchers to test and refine their software in collaboration doctors treating patients at SickKids. Brudno notes that a previous grant from the Ontario Genomics Institute was instrumental in getting the project started.

Brudno is affiliated with 老司机直播's Department of  Computer Science, the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Bimolecular Research, the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research and SickKids, where he is the director of the Centre for Computational Medicine. Bader is affiliated with the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research, the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Bimolecular Research, the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Molecular Genetics and the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital.

Professors Nicholas Provart of the Department of Cell & Systems Biology and the Centre for the Analysis of Genome Evolution and Function and Stephen Wright of the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and the Centre for the Analysis of Genome Evolution and Function received $1 million to develop visualization tools and applications to accelerate advances in plant biology, which are important for feeding, housing, clothing and providing energy to the world鈥檚 growing population.

Recent advances in DNA sequencing and other high throughput technologies have generated a deluge of information about Arabidopsis thaliana, an organism that biologists use as a model plant species鈥斺渢he fruit fly of plants,鈥 says Provart.

Interpreting and visualizing the data, Provart says, 鈥渃an be overwhelming for biologists, who aren鈥檛 necessarily skilled in the art of writing computer code.鈥

Currently, plant biologists in search of genetic data have to visit multiple sources and the result is fragmentation and inefficiency鈥攁nd useful data often ends up languishing.

He and Wright will participate in the development of international portal that will make existing data available to scientists in a desktop interface where they can pick and choose the data they want with the click of a mouse. The portal will help plant biologists advance a variety of research questions, many of which will be essential to supporting the world鈥檚 population, which is expected to reach nine billion by 2050.

Half the funding for Provart and Wright鈥檚 project will come from Genome Canada, the other half from the Moore Foundation and other sources.

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