Question: Why did you decide to write codes to solve biological questions? Was the decision based on your own findings or did somebody inspire you to?

Matthew Moore answered on 9 Mar 2015:

Hi!

I was initially motivated by an enthusiasm towards quantitative approaches, looking at data rather than experiments. At the moment too, there is an explosion of genetic data from human genes and (what I work on) bacterial genes, too.

All DNA is made up of four molecules which can be referred to as A,T,C and G. These make up the genetic code and constitute everything that is needed instruct cell machinery how to make you, or a bacteria, or a zebra –whatever you like.

I work with this data, using software and my own code I can work out from massive files of “ATACAGATAGCA…etc” (for millions of letters), which genes the organism has and how these genes are slightly different due to mutations!

It is making use of this data that will best approach problems such as antibiotic resistance, where infectious bacteria are no longer killed off by medicine. By finding out their genetic code, you can use computers to determine what differences in the genes cause this difference in sensitivity to antibiotics!

This is broadly referred to as ‘bioinformatics’ or ‘computational biology’ where there is loads of data that makes some biological sense when it’s analysed the right way! Other biological data might include data about proteins or about patient outcomes, for example trying to determine why one type of E.coli is worse than another when it infects someone!