Computational Biology

The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute has two dedicated research laboratories that conduct computational biology research. These are the Bioinformatics and Systems Medicine Laboratory, led by Dr Joshua Ho, and the Computational Genomics Laboratory, led by Dr Eleni Giannoulatou. Both laboratories have an emphasis on developing fast and reliable computer programs to answer a range of biomedical research problems.

For example, we are performing advanced computational analysis on whole genome sequencing data obtained from hundreds of families with congenital heart disease. Through this analysis, we aim to identify the genetic cause of this most common birth defect in Australia which affects one baby born every four hours. In addition to research in genomics, we also have strong expertise in transcriptomics and epigenomics research. For example, we perform large-scale analysis of single-cell RNA-seq data sets, to address fundamental problems of cell-type-specific gene expression variability.