Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics is an integral and growing part of Scotland’s life sciences sector. Within the last few years there has been high growth in bioinformatics activities. Scotland continues to require appropriately skilled bioinformatics professionals to keep pace with this change.
Hundreds of industrial and academic researchers have chosen to work in Scotland, making the country one of the largest global centres of bioinformatics excellence.
Scotland’s strengths in bioinformatics
Scotland’s key bioinformatics technical strengths include:
- Microarrays and gene expression analysis
- Sequence comparison and alignment
- Genome comparison
- Protein structure prediction and modelling
- Visualisation and image analysis
- Modelling of cellular processes
- Data and knowledge representation
- Medical applications of bioinformatics
Working in Bioinformatics in Scotland
The cross-discipline nature of bioinformatics means that your skills could find a home in a number of Scotland’s Life Sciences companies. Key industrial bioinformatics roles include drug discovery and arrays work in companies such as:
- CXR Biosciences
- Arrayjet
- Lab901
Find out more about Scotland's life sciences companies
View the latest job opportunities in life sciences in Scotland
Education and research in bioinformatics
An attractive feature of Scotland’s bioinformatics sector is a strong collaborative network between industry and academia who work closely on both consultancy projects to address particular key problems and long-term projects to develop novel intellectual property.
Academic research in Bioinformatics
Scotland’s bioinformatics sector has a large and active academic research community of more than 2000 full time equivalent research staff. This includes open-access research facilities such as Scottish Instrumentation and Resource Centre for Advanced Mass Spectrometry (SIRCAMS) at University of Edinburgh, and further facilities at Universities of Glasgow and Dundee. These specialise in instrumentation for proteomics, genomics and bioinformatics.
Two of the six prestigious government funded Beacon projects were awarded to groups based in Scotland under Professor Peter Ghazal at the University of Edinburgh and Professor David Gilbert at the University of Glasgow.
The University of Edinburgh has developed a Centre for Bioinformatics, a network drawing on several highly-rated academic schools within the University of Edinburgh. It also links other Universities and world-leading research institutes.
Scottish universities play a fundamental part in the National E-Science Centre (NeSC) based at the University of Edinburgh. This facility includes world-class networked grid computing equivalent to that found in major US biotech hubs. There are further main hubs at the Universities of Dundee and Glasgow.
Scotland’s centres of bioinformatics research excellence
- Roslin Institute Bioinformatics provide databases and applications supporting the international animal science community
- ARK-Genomics a national and UK-wide hub for farm animal genomics
- Moredun Institute open access Functional Genomics Unit
- Sir Henry Wellcome Functional Genomics Centrestate-of-the-art capabilities, including mass spectroscopy
- Scottish Informatics Mathematics Biology and Statistics Centre (SIMBIOS) mathematical and computational modelling of biomedical/environmental problems
- EPCC a leading European centre of expertise in advanced research, technology transfer and supercomputer services
Find out more about academic departments and research centres in Scotland