Introduction

Welcome to the Bioinformatics Lab (Labinfo) of the National Laboratory of Scientific Computation of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MCT).

Labinfo is located in the city of Petrópolis, an area of tropical forest, palaces and museums which is just 40 miles away from the city of Rio de Janeiro. Labinfo integrates a group of interdisciplinary investigators that includes biologists, computational scientists and mathematicians interested in developing statistical and computational methodologies to be applied in the fields of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

The group includes senior investigators, post-docs, system analysts, graduate and undergraduate students. The research in place goes from genomics to system biology. With so many genome projects (Brazilian Genome, South Genome, Nitrogen Fixators, Comparative Xylella, and Burkholderia) and metagenomes under our responsibility we have developed the software SABIA(System for Automated Bacterial genome Integrated Annotation) that assemblies, annotates and compares the genomes of prokaryotes, ESTs and eukaryotes. The Labinfo team has also developed several databases on different themes (MamiBase, TaxVibrio, Probacter, BMRC, TractorDB, CTPedia, among others) that are available in this website. Perhaps some of them will be useful to your research.

Aware of the lack of personnel specialized in this area, Labinfo has worked intensively towards training human resources. Besides being involved in the Computational Modelling Post-Graduation Program (master and doctoral degree), in the area of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (in collaboration with the Genetics Department of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), we also have several short courses that are offered all year long and run meetings in several areas of bioinformatics. Many investigators and students in this area have already participated in one of our activities.

Because of the diversity in academic backgrounds and broad variety of research projects now in place at Labinfo, intellectual life in the lab is very exciting. Besides the scientific collaboration that exists among our members, we also value collaboration with other institutes. We collaborate with several national groups and have many international collaborators such as SwissProt, the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, MD Anderson Cancer Center, at Texas University and Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France.

The Bioinformatics lab, since 2008, works closely with the Computational Genomics Lab Darcy Fontoura de Almeida (UGCDFA). Equipped with next-generation DNA sequencing -
454 GS FLX Genome Analyzer (Roche), this is a multi-user resource that aims to support the genome projects around the country. This lab also has the support of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology Julio Cascardo, opened in November 2010, which has an Applied Biosystems 3130 sequencer - Genetic Analyser and a StepOne Real Time PCR System (Applied Biosystems). The main objective of this new lab is to close the genomes sequenced in the UGCDFA as well as to validate, experimentally, the expression of genes that are identified by bioinformatics tools, which are of interest to the scientific community

I hope this website helps you to know more about our projects and who we are and perhaps it also instigates you to come visit us one day!

Thanks for your interest in Labinfo!

Ana Tereza