HOME > Research > Application > Thermosciences
  
 

-- Biological science consists of various kinds of scientific fields, including biology, molecular biology, microbiology, biochemistry, genetics, medical science, pharmacology and so on. In the present, however, newly arisen bioinformatics fields, such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and physiomics have become more and more important, with enabling us to apply computational techniques to the biological researches efficiently. Thanks to the rapid development of the internet and computing power, a large amount of biological information has been collected and manipulated by public databases, and various kinds of analytical tools for bioinformatics study also have been serviced and distributed via network system.

-- Because most of the advanced biological researches require complicated calculations, high performance computing systems have become more and more important in biological science. However, the high cost of those systems and the problem in managing their H/W and S/W efficiently decreased the usability of those "Supercomputing Systems" in each laboratory. The e-Science Project in KISTI, as a breakthrough for that problem, enables those small-scale wet labs to use various kinds of advanced analytical tools easily. We expect this project to provide a synergy in biological researches, with improving the international competitive power of our country in a near future.

 

-- Thanks to the rapid development of bioinformatics researches, various kinds of analytical tools for genome and proteome studies have been reported worldwide. Many biological studies usually require sequential analysis. For example, if someone want to create a phylogenetic tree using base or amino acid sequences, step by step processes, including sequence homology searching using BLAST program, multiple sequence alignment using ClustalW, editing aligned results with biological editing programs such as BioEdit or GeneDoc, and finally, creating phylogenetic trees using tree-building programs such as PHYLIP or PAUP, are essentially required. For the purpose of improving the analytical efficiency, "Bioworks System" is developed by KISTI on the basis of e-Science environment.

 

-- Bioworks is designed to make, visualize, automate and execute a model of biological analysis processes as a workflow in biotechnology field. It provides for constructing a workflow model of complex biological analysis processes more easily and reporting the analysis results of each step. Users can perform their analysis process by using a visuality and validation module provided as a plug-in program. It supports sharing their workflow in XML format, to which conversion is supplied by Bioworks, with Web Services to improve the efficiency of their study.

 

-- The Bioworks system consists of two parts, such as Workflow builder for modeling a biological workflow based on XML, and Workflow Engine for validating and executing the created XML files.

 

-- Workflow Builder provides an user-oriented interface which can support biological researchers to make workflows for their analysis easily. Workflow builder is constructed by four different modules. The first part of them is the "Service Explorer" module, which can be used to search the bioservices by keyword or category and second one is the "Workflow Editor" module allows users to check out the status of each process, and "Result Browser", the last part of modules, conducts the visualization and analyzing processes in each worlflow step.

 

-- Workflow engine generates workflow models, which are composed of the processor, Input/output links and filter system for data converting, and the results from each execute step can be separately created.

 

-- Currently, the biological market is rapidly increased, and it is intensively fostered as national strategic industries. Especially, in the recently started research such as genomics, massive biological data are being analyzed and a variety of applied studies are being performed by using these data. To keep up with this trend, it is necessary to foster our analytical skills to handle huge amount of biological data as well as various kinds of analytical tools efficiently. We expect Bioworks to be a pioneer system in biological studies, with providing an convenient workflow platform for complicated analytical processes.