Research in the Bender group comprises a wide variety of methodological developments, as well as applications, of computer science methods to chemical and biological datasets obtained from the life sciences. Given that the (historical) distinction of ‘chemical’ and ‘biological’ disciplines is no longer useful (if it ever was), the focus of the group is on the integrated analysis of life science datasets – we need to understand (and describe to the computer) both the chemical side (e.g. the chemical structure of a potential new drug, or probe), as well as the biological side (e.g. the high-content readout obtained from a screening platform), in order to make sense of current life science datasets. Research areas in the group overlap to some extent in order to provide synergy between the projects, and current research areas are as follows:
