This area focuses on the development of new approaches and computational tools in the area of functional genomics.
Functional genomics opens up new possibilities and raises new requirements.
We see the direct contacts and exchanges with experimental biologists that will take place within the framework of this programme as an excellent opportunity for the bioinformatics community to access information obtained by the state of the art experimental technologies and to collect requirements and feedback about its own work and projects. The current scope of in silico methods is very broad, covering as it does many different topics that pave the 'virtual path' leading from sequence to global function. As a starting point for our activities, we propose to focus on four emerging domains, with the possibility of incorporating new methodologies as they appear. Prediction of protein-protein interactions based on the analysis of multiple sequence alignments . These methods are related to earlier developments in sequence analysis and protein structure prediction in the area of bioinformatics.