Dr Kevin Bryson Lecturer in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Bioinformatics Group Department of Computer Science University College London Malet Place, London WC1E 6BT, UK. Member of BCB and CoMPLEX.

Overview of Research

We are a new research lab in bioinformatics and systems biology based in the Bioinformatics Group within the Department of Computer Science at UCL. We have links with the Bloomsbury Centre for Bioinformatics (BCB) and the Centre for Mathematics and Physics in the Life Sciences and Experimental Biology (CoMPLEX).

As a bioinformatics and systems biology research lab, we gratefully acknowledge the experimental biology and clinical labs that make our work possible, and we are always open to collaboration with experimental labs working on relevant areas.

Unlike the general methology taken by bioinformatics (which tends to be techique-centric), we take a disease-centric view where we investigate how to apply and integrate a diverse range of techniques from Bioinformatics and Systems Biology to help understand complex diseases. To drive our investigation, we are focusing on the polyglutamine (polyQ) expansion disorders, of which there are currently nine known, including Huntington's Disease (Table 1). These inherited neurodegenerative disorders result from an expanded region of polyglutamine residues within different proteins, and belong to a wider class of diseases that arise from unstable trinucleotide repeats.

All these disorders show certain similarities, such as the relationship between age of onset and number of glutamines within the repeat, that tentatively suggest a common underlying mechanism. In a similar manner to most complex diseases, a large number of disease mechanisms have been proposed for polyQ expansion disorders. One of our key aims is to take a holistic viewpoint, integrating a wide range of experimental and predicted results, to support particular disease mechanisms over others. In doing so, we hope to drive forward both a better understanding of these diseases and also, more generally, the application of bioinformatics and systems biology to benefit translational medicine.

Further details can be found on our research and projects pages.

This page last modified 21 March, 2008 by Kevin Bryson