A research center for functional genomics is to be opened at Greifswald University in northern Germany at the end of this year as a focus for the development and coordination of research integrating the computational and biological sciences.
“The center is unique in Germany because faculty and participants drawn from the departments of mathematics, science, and medicine will be working closely together for the first time,” said Uwe Volker, the principal investigator at Greifswald's functional genomics lab.
Volker said that the center's research on the biomathematical analysis of proteins and their subcellular localization would be of central importance to a major research program at the university on the molecular mechanisms behind infectious diseases.
“With the help of functional genomics, we want to find out how bacterial pathogens interact with the host cell. If we can identify the key proteins that allow pathogenic bacteria to communicate with the host cells, then...