The College of Information Science and Technology (IS&T) at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) offers one of only a handful of Bioinformatics undergraduate programs in the United States. The program also includes research, laboratory, and course offerings for graduate or doctoral students who wish to expand their education beyond the traditional boundaries of biological research. UNO Bioinformatics also provides an extensive network of laboratories to students for scientific training and research with other scientific institutions.

Dr. Hesham Ali is the Dean of the College of IS&T and a Professor of Computer Science. Ali leads the UNO Bioin-formatics research group. Their focus is to develop pioneering computational approaches to identify and classify biological organisms, with the goal of complementing current experimental approaches to predict a wide range of events that range from potential virus outbreaks to bioterrorism. In recent years biological database searching has been conducted predominately via local alignment heuristics, pattern matching, and comparison of short statistically significant patterns.

The research interest of Dr. Dhundy (Kiran) Bastola's laboratory is in identifying biological organisms using these targets. Bastola is an Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics for the College of IS&T. Currently a group of his researchers are developing a computational method to identify medically important fungi using non-traditional genetic sequences as a target. This requires developing a structural environment to store sequence data, and providing a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to both administer and query the sequence data.

This database (GUI) is different from the genetic sequence repository such as the gene bank and ensemble. It can be considered as a secondary database, which contains sequences that have been validated using biologically sound algorithms and provides for the development of novel search algorithms that can accept stringent parameters to increase specificity.

Biological networks are complex; they require precise interactions between components with an extremely wide as-sortment of structures. Accurate models for system-wide activity cannot be built solely with theoretical explanation of molecular interactions. Daniel Quest, who just completed his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics, takes steps towards simulating the living cell.

Transcription factors bind to the DNA to turn on or turn off the activity of genes. Gene activity is responsible for most everything that happens in terms of development or disease. Quest uses computational modeling and High Performance Computing (HPC) to find the location of transcription factors and to reconstruct regulatory pathways (the turning on and off of genes). Modeling cellular interaction networks in this way provides a better understanding of what is happening globally inside of the cell than can currently be achieved through experimentation alone. The HPC provides the ability to describe and depict cellular interaction networks in the utmost detail.

Though Leonardo da Vinci had the ability to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in transcendent detail, a simple theoretical explanation remains elusive for many phenomena because of the complexity of the essential parts the inner-workings of a cell contains.

The Bioinformatics laboratory helps biologists extract knowledge from the data the researchers gather. While computational tools are used to do this, it is the collaboration between researchers from various areas that ultimately yields the answers the scientist seeks.