The Notre Dame Bioinformatics Laboratory focuses on computational genomics and its application to Global Health and Ecology research. What distinguishes our work is its collaborative and interdisciplinary nature to solve non-model bioinformatics problems. We have been at the leading edge of related data-intensive technologies such as high-performance computing and high-throughput sequencing, and continue to contribute to these areas.
Currently, we are heavily involved in mosquito and malaria genomics in collaboration multiple faculty members in the Department of Biological Sciences at Notre Dame. Most of this work is focused on the NCBI-funded project to sequence genomes of An.gambiae M and S forms. We also work on "next-generation" sequencing bioinformatics for a diverse collection of species including plants and insects.
A common theme in our research is deriving long-range computational problems in the process helping our colleagues with their short-term bioinformatics needs. Most of this work centers on non-model organism "draft" genomes that are likely to never be finished to a level similar to the human genome. We are currently developing tools and software systems for these fragmented genomes, including ecological samples, which will be made available here when published.