The research area "Medical Bioinformatics" at the Medical Proteome Center (MPC) is headed by Prof. Dr. Martin Eisenacher. The scientists of the research area accompany the applied research of the other research areas of the Medical Proteome Center with customized solutions and address their own questions as well as the optimization of methods of bioinformatics / biostatistics for proteomics with mass spectrometry (both are supported by state-of-the-art IT solutions such as the server virtualization system with numerous compute servers and databases, as well as the archive and backup solutions, workflow environments, cloud computing, containerization and orchestration).

The newly developed and established methods and algorithms are used for statistical and bioinformatics analysis of mass spectrometric data on the one hand and quantitative clinical data and protein expression data on the other hand in order to answer questions from the life sciences.

Some current keywords on methods and algorithms (as of 8 / 2022):

• Quality control of mass spectrometry data
• Score calibration and FDR estimation for large sequence databases
• Detection of peptide variants
• Creation and use of large protein and peptide databases for Metaproteomics
• Development of free-to-use user-friendly open source tools
• Application of artificial intelligence / machine learning methods
• determination of biomarker candidates (e. g. to distinguish experimental groups with respect to disease state or prognosis)
• Descriptive and differential statistical analysis, study design and sample size estimation, survival analysis
• (Re-)analysis of data sets with newly developed methods and under new aspects
• participation in EuBIC - European Bioinformatics Community for Mass Spectrometry

The research area "Medical Bioinformatics" has been involved in the "German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI)" since 2014 (BMBF funding from 2014-2021, now located at Forschungszentrum Jülich), in which the area’s expertise is offered to life science researchers in various tool or evaluation-based services as well as training (see here). de.NBI is part of the European ELIXIR infrastructure (https://elixir-europe.org/) as the German node.

In the research building "PRODI - molecular protein diagnostics", data from different clinical and instrumental fields are evaluated across platforms. The aim is to identify and validate early biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease and for cancerous diseases such as colon and lung carcinoma.

Members of the research department teach courses on bioinformatics in different faculties and courses of study, and we regularly assign topics / projects for internships, bachelor's, master's and doctoral theses.