Biology is enjoying yet another transformation, comparable in impact to that brought by recombinant DNA technologies, and before that, by the Darwinian revolution. From its beginnings in natural history and observation, biology is now driven by powerful methods and enormous data reserves. For the first time, biologists plan experiments that produce quantities of data measured in terabytes. I believe that the single most common experimental method in use today among biologists is the computational tool known as a BLAST search, used to compare one DNA or protein sequence against others, or even all others. In the past, training of biologists at the undergraduate level consisted of a few courses in calculus, and occasionally a course in statistics. Clearly, much has to change in the way that we train biologists of the future, and UC Berkeley is leading the way through the efforts of the Center for Computational Biology (CCB).
CCB is a program of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) and is administratively housed in the institute. Simply put the mission of the Center is to support research on subjects that cover the interface between computation and biology, and to foster graduate and undergraduate education in the applications of computation to biology. The Center combines the research strengths and interests of 30 faculty, from 9 different departments and five colleges, to provide unparalleled opportunities for innovative research and learning. The Center was recently awarded the opportunity to recruit 7 leaders of the field to the strong base that was already here at the Center’s inception. We have had fantastic success with our first recruits and look forward to adding three to four more faculty in Computational Biology in the coming few years.
The faculty of the Center includes an all-star list of scholars including members of the National Academies of Science and of Engineering, a MacArthur Fellow, an HHMI Investigator, an HHMI Professor, and recipients of numerous awards in related fields. The research interests of the Center span the range from analysis of genomes and their expression, to phylogenetic investigation of molecular function, to quantitative analysis of population biology and genetics, to mathematical models of molecular machines, to biostatistical design of experiments and clinical trials, to studies of protein and system dynamics.
The Center has chosen as one focus of its efforts the computational interpretation of variation in the human genome. The variation in each of our genomes is both an historical record of our individual ancestries and the foundation for how biology will impact each of us. Personal genetic information is already in wide use in the area of diagnostics of inherited disease and in the near future will guide strategies for treating disease as pharmacogenomics transitions from an academic to an applied discipline. With the opportunity for each of us to obtain our personal genome sequence for a thousand dollars looming in the near future, interpreting each individual's 6 million variations from the reference sequence will be a defining challenge for biology in this century. The Center hopes to make seminal technical and conceptual contributions to help meet this challenge.
The training in the Center focuses on a combination of course work taught by the faculty in the various departments, and hands-on laboratory mentoring in individual research projects. Students wishing to train with the faculty of the Center are admitted to graduate study through one of the departments with which center faculty are affiliated, and the students then work toward a Ph.D. in that Department. The Center houses the Designated Emphasis in Computational Biology and Genomics, a Certificate program that confers a certification of accomplishment in Computational Biology.
We invite you to join us and help transform biology in the years ahead.
Jasper Rine, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Computational Biology
Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development