Using Ontologies and Data Fusion Approaches to Understand Organismal Aging

Sean Mooney, Buck Institute for Aging

The Mooney laboratory and the Bioinformatics Core at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, have been collaborating with the NCBO for several years. To this end, we have developed several applications of NCBO tools and have applied them toward understanding the underlying causes of observed experimental results, these include STOP (http://www.mooneygroup.org/stop/) and DEFOG (http://www.mooneygroup.org/defog/).  Informatic research in aging is a critical endeavor because currently there are many disparate high throughput experiments from a variety of organisms which do not take advantage of the statistical benefits that can be gained from data integration and ontologies.  Additionally, recent studies and reviews have highlighted the need for integration efforts in gene expression microarrays and integration efforts in proteomics and protein interaction. Although some of the markers of aging are known in model organisms, their mechanisms are not clear, nor is the transferability of this knowledge to other model organisms and humans.  For this DBP, we will continue to work with the NCBO to build tools to aid molecular biology and basic biomedical research, and will apply these methods to specific, highly relevant problems in aging research with other Buck Institute laboratories.