When it comes to developing medicines and advancing the understanding of plant and bacteria behavior, massive biological datasets could be key in finding answers, but researchers need effective ways to analyze the increasing amounts of data.

A new multidisciplinary research center at the University of North Texas is developing computational methods for analyzing and interpreting these large datasets so they can be used to solve pressing problems in biology and medicine.

The Center for Computational Life Sciences (CCLS) is a collaboration between the UNT College of Engineering, the College of Science and the College of Information. It includes 40 affiliated faculty members representing disciplines such as biology, biomedical engineering, computer science, information science and mathematics.

“We wanted to create this to center as a platform where biologists, chemists, computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians could come together and discuss these ideas to increase our research impact and productivity,” says Serdar Bozdag, an associate professor in mathematics and computer science and engineering who is serving as the center’s director.

High-throughput technologies such as next-generation sequencing have revolutionized scientific discoveries allowing researchers to measure data like entire genomes of hundreds of samples in days, generating terabytes of data.

“It used to be that researchers could open up an excel document, crunch the numbers and then do their own data analysis,” Bozdag says. “But with the advent of high-throughput technologies, now they’re producing vast amounts of biological data, which introduces the new challenge of how to store and interpret it.”

This is where bioinformatics also known as computational biology comes in, Bozdag says. Bioinformatics uses computer technology, such as machine learning, to collect, store and analyze biological data, which can help scholars more efficiently extract valuable knowledge and decrease experimental time.  

For example, in drug screening tests, drugs are applied to cancer cells and researchers examine the efficacy of these drugs by measuring if the cells die or not. There also are gene expression datasets showing the activity of all the genes from cells that died and cells that did not. If researchers wanted to determine the causal genes of the drug response, they’d have to study each individual gene and their combinations in those cells.

“If you think about the human genome, we have about 20,000 genes. When you look at the pairs of those it becomes 400,000. If you look at triples the numbers explode,” Bozdag says. “You can’t reasonably do experiments for all those combinations, but with bioinformatics, we can give those researchers the top 10 things to look into.”

In turn, biologists will continue to test those emerging patterns, creating new data for bioinformatics researchers to analyze before refining what pattern to prioritize studying next.

“There are several UNT faculty members creating these kinds of datasets already in their research. There is a need on our campus for computational methods, and the center will help fulfill that need,” Bozdag says.

Work is already underway to create smaller research groups that link biologists with analysts. Faculty members of the center held a retreat in the spring where they discussed their current projects and expertise. Others teamed up based on their interest in projects listed as national priorities by the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Faculty affiliated with the center already have nearly $25 million in active research grants combined. For example, Bozdag received a $1.8 million Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award from the U.S. National Institutes of Health for his research on developing computational tools to integrate multiple types of biological datasets and another nearly $300,000 NIH grant to identify potential drugs for Alzheimer’s disease treatment.

Bozdag hopes connections forged through the center will enable faculty to apply for even more grants and work on larger projects that will make a transformative impact on the field.

The center aims to help students at UNT as well by providing research and training opportunities, especially those students in the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence program as they develop machine learning algorithms that analyze vast datasets.

In the future, the center will hold educational workshops including ones where other faculty and students can learn the basics of bioinformatic approaches to research and how they can get involved with bioinformatics projects at UNT.

The center also has plans to work internally with UNT’s Advanced Environmental Research Institute and BioDiscovery Institute. Externally, Bozdag says the center will engage with nearby universities and industry businesses for collaboration opportunities.

“We want people to be able to come together and really collaborate so that we can make breakthrough discoveries in life sciences and medicine, and they can start here at UNT,” Bozdag says.