Bioinformatics and computational biology research is concerned with applying computer science and engineering approaches to develop new tools and techniques for biological data analysis. Advancements in biotechnology have resulted in a massive amount of data that can be used to generate new biological knowledge. Analysis of this data benefits from techniques from areas such as artificial intelligence, visualization, and high performance computing. Ongoing projects in the department involve developing novel algorithms for analysis of high throughput sequence data, improved visualization of genomes and genomic features, and hardware acceleration of bioinformatics algorithms. Bioinformatics faculty members collaborate with researchers in the life sciences at MSU and institutions around the country. Several faculty members are affiliated with the interdisciplinary Institute for Genomics, Biocomputing, and Biotechnology (IGBB) (http://www.igbb.msstate.edu).
