Our group, together with eleven other researchers from the FSU Jena, University hospital Jena, non-university research institutes and the private sector, receives over 1.3 million euros from the Thuringian Ministry of Science to advance the digitization of life sciences. The project will start in 2020 and is initially scheduled for five years.
The overall goal is the development of new methods and programs to support researchers in life sciences in the data analysis and the generation of new insights by combining bioinformatics and machine learning. The computer scientists (Bocklitz, Böcker, Dittrich, Giesen, Hoffmann, Hölzer, Marz, Scherag) will develop new methods and tools for processing the immense amounts of data (with a few petabytes allocated to the area of “big data”). These new methods can only be generated in close collaboration with the application areas (Brandt, Ehricht, Küsel, Monecke, Pletz, Pohnert, Wegner). The innovative applications of these methods in biology and medicine are intended as examples of the future and thus set milestones in the development of digitization in the life sciences.