Modern Biology, often referred to as the key science of the 21th century, is currently undergoing a transformation. The amount and complexity of the data demands the integration of the traditional biology with other sciences. New theoretical concepts, modern methods of data analysis, and mathematical models will play a strategic role in molecular biology. Progress in order to reach this goals can only be achieved by intensive interdisciplinary collaboration and Visual Analytics technology will be key for success.

The recently approved research project “Finding new overlapping/embedded genes and their theory”, which is part of the Priority Program “Information and communication theory in molecular biology” (for details see http://www.uni-ulm.de/in/inkombio.html) funded by the German Science Foundation, deals with finding new overlapping genes in the quickly growing body of DNA data. Visual Analytics techniques will help to deal with the complexity of the gene analysis and clustering of the open reading frames, and to gain insight into the properties of overlapping genes. Collaboration Partners of the project are information theory scientists from the University of Ulm, biologists from the Technical University of Munich, and Visual Analytics scientists from the University of Konstanz.

The University of Konstanz is currently searching for a PhD candidate to fill the open position.