We are the Bioinformatics Group of the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and we are mainly responsible for bioinformatics research and service at the MPI-AGE.

We have a broad research focus that is mainly dedicated to help solving biological problems. We achieve this by a very close interaction with researchers in biological research labs, located here at the MPI-AGE in Cologne, as well as in many other research institutions around the globe. Due to these close ties with a biological research environment, we are partly dedicating our efforts to the development of bioinformatics tools and databases that will help advance biological sciences. Our research focus includes furthermore functional genomics and proteomics and we are part of the German-wide BMBF project on Systems Biology, the 'Virtual Liver'.



Focus Nucleic Acids

    we have developed a web-based tool for the design and quality control of esiRNAs.
    • check out DEQOR!

    the RiDDLE database holds pre-calculated, DEQOR-optimized esiRNAs for human, mouse and rat! (Fly and worm are coming soon!)
    • check out RiDDLE!

    we have developed a web-based tool, SeLOX, for finding lox-like sites in viral LTRs that helps in developing effective drugs for the removal of retroviruses such as HIV from genomes
    • check out SeLOX!



Focus Proteins

    the ProFAT server performs functional annotation based on weak sequence similarity and literature-based text mining (PubMed).
    • check out ProFAT (currently unavailable (06.2010))!

    the HMMerThread database holds information on remotely conserved domains of entire genomes.
    • check out HMMerThread-db!

    we are currently working on morFeus, a program to automatically detect remote orthologues
    • check out the morFeus project-page!



Focus Systems Biology - the "virtual Liver"

    in the current round of financing (BMBF 031 5737, 04/2010 - 03/2014) our efforts are dedicated to biological data analysis & integration (genomics, expression arrays, proteomics). Find more details on our work here.
    ProFAT and the HMMerThread database are the results of our previous two funding phases (since 2000), as well as the software tool PYPer for a fully integrated, semi-automatic phylogenetic analysis of proteins.
    • check out the PYPer project page


Find a detailed list of projects currently running in the lab here.