What do you get when you marry computer power, mathematics and biological research? The answer is bioinformatics and computational biology. The most important frontier of discovery may not be the exploration of outer space, but rather, an understanding of the workings of inner space.

Bioinformatics and computational biology are among today's hottest fields of research and education, yet it wasn't long ago that computer know-how, math and biology research each resided in completely separate worlds.

These worlds were destined to start to merge once efforts to sequence the human genome began 15 years ago, explains Dr. Shoshana Wodak, newly appointed Scientific Director for the Centre for Computational Biology and the Ontario Centre for Genomic Computing (OCGC) located at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

In 1997, the OCGC was created to provide the province with a central hub for attracting and keeping world-class scientists, as well as a centrally available bioinformatics service for academic institutions. With its 192 processors, 178GB RAM and 3TB disk space, the supercomputer was the largest in Canada dedicated to genomics, and became an essential tool for researchers and educators across Ontario.

It wasn't until the availability of the first working draft of the human genome, less than five years ago, that computer systems technology and mathematical models began to be applied rigorously to the management, analysis and simulation of the complex structures and processes of biological data.

Once the gene sequences were identified, the next hurdle was to be able to interpret the data. While the human genome's 3 billion base pairs only take up 3 GB of computer memory, the data required to figure out what it all means continues to be an enormous challenge for researchers.

What actual information do the gene sequences represent? Where are the genes in the cell? What do they do? How do they react in one environment versus another, and why?

As more data is collected from experiments, a complex behavioural network of interactions and associations slowly begin to emerge, complicated by the fact that these behaviour patterns tend to change with time.

The computational challenges are staggering. Some experiments require billions of computations. Every experiment creates massive amounts of new data, which in turn has to be interpreted, compared and tested. As this database of knowledge increases, new and better tests and models have to be created to carry out increasingly more advanced levels of analysis.

"It's become so complex that you cannot hope to make sense of it without computational approaches and the ability to handle huge amounts of data," says Dr. Wodak. "At OCGC, we provide crucial resources to advance this kind of research in Ontario."

OCGC offers its services via the Internet to genomics researchers in Ontario and beyond. Connecting at 1 gigabit per second to ORION through GTAnet means that the transfer of large datasets and images in real time will become much more practical, and the capability for collaborative research activities will vastly improve for users whose work involves massive data.

"The increased access to data and increased speed of computation will no doubt be crucial to moving this research process forward," adds Dr. Wodak. "We are actively building a collaborative network of world class research between Ontario's research and education institutions and the OCGC's research resources - including our researcher staff, powerful computing hardware and ability to provide technical expertise."

"We have made important progress from where we were seven years ago - from simply looking at individual molecules in isolation, to today's efforts at trying to understand how the components of a cell operate in creating an actual living cell," says Dr. Wodak. "We are still at the beginning of this process, however. On one hand we need to develop better tools, but on the other hand we still need to generate more and better data with which to develop better models of gene behaviour."

Dr. Wodak is among the featured scientists presenting at the first Annual Ontario R&E Summit, in Toronto, June 14 and 15. She is participating in the Ontario R&E Showcase session, June 15.

She obtained her PhD degree from Columbia University in New York, USA. She was Professor at the Free University of Brussels for over 20 years, where she founded and co-directed the Centre of Structural Biology and Bioinformatics and started a Master's program in Bioinformatics with colleagues in 2001. She occupied the position of Group Leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) between 1996 and 2001.

To learn more, visit the Ontario Centre for Genomic Computing web site at www.ocgc.ca.