The NCTU Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Institute is the first Institute of Bioinformatics and is ranked among the best in Taiwan, as evidenced by the excellence of the faculty and students as well as the quality of interdisciplinary educational programs. The Major is designed for highly motivated students interested in interdisciplinary activities in life sciences, computer science, statistics, systems biology, and computational biology. Leading the Institute's research and teaching activities are 10 professors and 5 core facilities (e.g. over 300-cpu PC clusters and 40 MAC computers). The Institute has over 28 and 40 graduate students pursuing master and doctorate degrees, respectively.
The NCTU Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology carries out research in structural bioinformatics, systems biology (e.g. gene networks and metabolic pathways), drug discovery, biological databases and algorithms, molecular evolution, computational chemistry, and functional genomics. Supporting by National Science Council and Ministry of Education, the Institute has installed the sole Structural Bioinformatics and Computer-aided Drug Design Core Facilities. On average, each faculty publishes 5 papers/year and the sum of impact factor is over 20/year; and the grant is over 3,000,000/year. These Principle Investigators have produced renowned computational packages and databases: GEMDOCK, for drug design; 3D-BLAST, for a super fast structure database search; miRNAMap, genomic maps of microRNAs in mammalian genomes; and CELLO, for sub-cellular localization prediction.
The Molecular Bioinformatics Center (MBC) was established in 2006 as a national resource for bioinformatics and computational systems biology in Taiwan. MBC performs research in computational biology, develops software tools and novel algorithms for analyzing biological data and creates public databases. The research areas cover protein structure prediction and classification, computational drug docking, protein thermostability prediction, data mining, RNA secondary structure prediction and large-scale genomic sequence alignment.