BioInformatics projects

Protein kinase genes and tumorigenesis: mechanisms, prevention and treatment.  (a Bioinformatics study)

Protein kinases (PKs) regulate the majority of cellular pathways, especially those involved in the transmission of signals within the cells.  Disregulated kinase activity is a frequent cause of disease, and disregulated PK genes can act as oncogenes. This project aims to conduct a computer-based  literature mining study to clarify the relationships between PK gene activity and tumorigenesis, and to make a cross-organism investigation of the structural and functional characteristics of mammalian PK genes. The outcome will benefit not only our understanding of the relationship between PK gene regulation/disregulation and the development of malignant neoplasms, but also the discovery of the methods for prevention and treatment of cancerous diseases.  The project supervision team integrates expertise in Biomedical Sciences, Bioinformatics, Molecular Biology and Biostatistics.

Components:

1. Literature mining for the relationship between the biological characteristics of neoplasms and the cellular characteristics of PK genes
2. Phylogenetic analysis of the mammalian PK genes: their evolutionary relationship.
3. An examination of the distribution of functional structure in gene flanking regions and to compare the codon usage in the coding sequences.
4. A comparison of the codon usage in different kinomes.
5. A cross-species comparison of the compositional characteristics within the introns of mammalian PK genes. 

Supervisor

Dr Guang Bin Liu

Privacy preserving data sharing in data mining environments

Preserving privacy in data mining among various enterprises and organisations is essential for many real world applications in areas like health surveillance, business analysis, fraud detection and terror protection. Efficient and effective techniques are badly needed to protect privacy in data sharing and data mining. The developed cutting-edge techniques in this project will be implemented in freely available open source software tools, empowering Australian organisations to utilise the techniques to develop intelligent systems in data sharing environments. These techniques will ultimately lead to better utilisation of the information available in many enterprises and organisations.

Supervisor

Dr Hua Wang

Security and privacy issues in E-learning

The increasing demand for education, for reduction of study costs and for flexible study location has encouraged developers providing different types of learning systems. While a variety of E-learning advantages have been recognised for a long time and many advances in E-learning systems have been implemented, the needs for security and privacy protection provide new challenges which have only begun to be studied. This project is to study the particular problems and challenges of the E-learning environment. The goal of the project is therefore to foster communication between various communities including security and privacy communities, distributed systems and information systems communities.

Supervisor