Research in the Jonassen group

The Jonassen group both develops and applies computational methods for the analysis of molecular biology data, with a focus on high-throughput data.

Current research focuses on

• analysis of gene expression data in cancer studies (through participation in the CCBIO centre of excellence),
• analysis of metagenomic data,
• sea lice genomics (through participation in the SLRC centre for research based innovation),
• integrative bioinformatics (through participation in the Excelerate / Elixir)
• systems biology (through participation in the Digital Life Norway centre)

My group is active in building and operating research infrastructures including the Norwegian bioinformatics platform, operating the Norwegian Node - Elixir Norway

We have developed a number of bioinformatics tools, including

• the motif discovery tool Pratt for discovery of patterns in sets of unaligned protein sequences,
• the tool SPratt (see also more efficient algorithm), and
• the J-Express tool for gene expression data analysis (see also newer publication).

We contributed to one of the first fully-automated methods for predicting regulatory elements on a genome-level scale using global gene expression data (Genome Research paper).

We have also played central roles in collaborative projects with experimental groups, including genome sequencing projects (methylococcus capsulatus, cod genome, francisella noatuensis), cancer studies (e.g., angiogenesis in brain cancer, epigenetics in prostate cancer, marker gene discovery), and other medical studies (e.g., Sjögren syndrom).