Graduate Program in Bioinformatics
The Graduate Program in Bioinformatics PPGBIOINFO, an academic master's, has as main objectives enabling students to develop scientific knowledge and its application in the execution of research and development activities aimed at solving problems or proposing technological innovations for advancement of the frontier of knowledge in bioinformatics; Define, propose, coordinate and execute research and technological development projects in its lines of action, aiming to meet specific demands for national, regional and/or local development; Interact with research institutes, companies, public and private, and other organizations, especially with PPGBIOINFO participating institutions, in the development of interdisciplinary research, knowledge transfer and innovation generation to contribute to the development of these organizations and, consequently, to contribute for local, regional and national development.
The PPGBIOINFO graduate should be able to study advances in knowledge from a scientific and technological point of view, and apply this knowledge to solve problems and/or propose new scientific methodologies and technological innovations.
PPGBIOINFO is rated by CAPES in the area of Biological Sciences I and currently has a grade of 3.
Research Lines
Description of the research lines
The area of concentration “Bioinformatics” encompasses the research, development and application of computational and statistical techniques and methods for the production of methodologies for the analysis and interpretation of biological data of various natures, involving genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic data, among others, aiming at the discovery of biological knowledge from the analyzed data.
Computational and systemic biology
This line of research involves: (a) sequence analysis and phylogeny by means of probabilistic sequence models, sequence search and clustering algorithms, among other techniques; (b) systemic biology with the holistic study of cell molecular biology, the study of interactions between biological components and how such interactions generate functions and control system behavior; (c) evolutionary algorithms, by developing algorithms for combinatorial optimization in multidimensional problems in which it is not possible to traverse the whole space of characteristics/combinations; (d) ontologies, data mining and databases through the extraction of biological information in texts, databases and other sources of information, data integration and biologically relevant ontologies; and (e) bioimages that deal with the acquisition, analysis, mining and visualization of images produced by microscopes with emphasis on the interdisciplinary development of techniques for solving problems at various levels: molecular, subcellular, and supercellular.
Genetics and Genomics
This line of research involves: (a) genome analysis, genome assembly, comparative genomics, genome annotation and chromosomes, among others; (b) gene expression analysis, development of statistical methods for recognizing differentially expressed genes, expression-based classifiers, methods for determining and describing regulatory networks, pathway analysis, expression data integration, expression data annotation and genes. or set of genes; and (c) population genetics through segregation analysis, linkage analysis, association analysis, genetic map construction, population simulations, haplotyping, marker discovery and genotyping.