The Carolina Environmental Bioinformatics Center

Overview

 

The Carolina Environmental Bioinformatics Center has broad-ranging capability to enhance and advance the field of Computational Toxicology.  The Center develops novel analytic and computational methods, creates efficient user-friendly tools to disseminate the methods to the wider community, and applies the computational methods to data from molecular toxicology and other studies.

The effort is divided into three Research Projects and an Administrative Unit.Each Research Project is further divided into Functional Areas consisting of Analysis, Methods Development, and Tools Development.Project 1 (Biostatistics in Computational Biology) provides biostatistical support to the Center, performs data analysis at the US EPA and develops new methods in collaboration with EPA personnel and the computational toxicology community.Project 2 (Chem-informatics) coordinates the compilation and mining of data from relevant external databases and performs analysis and methods development for investigating Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships with burgeoning high-throughput chem-informatics data.In addition, Project 2 develops computational tools to perform these tasks.Project 3 (Computational Infrastructure for Systems Toxicology) works to create a framework for merging data from various –omic technologies in a systems biology approach.The investigation of rodent liver toxicity is used as a driving biological problem, inspiring new methods and architectures for data storage.Finally, Project 3 provides programming support for the further development of tools arising from Projects 1 and 2.The Administration Core provides staff and support to the Center, is responsible for ensuring that Center objectives and goals are being met, and provides oversight for each for the Functional Areas. Public Outreach and Translation Activity (POTA) ensures that the activities of the Center are translated into useable information and materials for the public and policy makers.

The Center is advancing the field of computational toxicology through the development of new methods and tools, as well as through direct collaborative efforts with EPA and other environmental scientists.In each Project, new methods are being developed and published that represent the state-of-the-art.The tools developed within each project are disseminated, and will be useful both to trained bioinformatics scientists and bench scientists.The synthesis of data from a variety of sources will move the field of computational toxicology from a hypothesis-driven science toward a predictive science.