The Biostatistics group at IKBM has its major research activities in the exciting and highly evolving scientific borderland between bioinformatics and applied statistics. Being at a biotechnology department, it is not unnatural that functional and comparative genomics have been in our focus in recent years, but also proteomics, chemometrics and other life sciences have received contributions from our group.
One major activity is to improve methods for analyzing gene expression data. A specific project is aimed at developing stable and robust assays for early detection of breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease using gene expression technology and peripheral blood as clinical sample. This is done in collaboration with the company Diagenic AS.
Another major activity is microbial comparative genomics, where we are developing methods for whole-genome analyses of prokaryotes. This is done in collaboration with the Microbial gene technology group at IKBM as well as the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science and the Microbial Comparative Genomics group at CBS, DTU, Denmark.
One of the current projects is a collaboration with the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science and the Norwegian Veterinary Institute where major databases of Norwegian cattle, goats, farms, slaughterhouses, milk production, trade, etc. are analysed. The aim is to make use of multivariate statistical process controland spatio-temporal analysis to develop a system for risk based surveillance of cow diseases.
The group is also responsible for teaching courses in statistics, bioinformatics and mathematics at the university. We have devoted many resources to introducing R and the R Commander in all courses from the basic introductory to Master courses in statistics and bioinformatics, see http://repository.umb.no/R/.
