Researchers at UCD's NCRA are repaying the debt for the inspiration they gain from Natural and in particular Biological systems through the application of their algorithms to biological modelling problems. Currently, Grammatical Evolution and Self-Organising Swarm algorithms are being applied across a range of problems from the domain of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology. Some examples are listed below.

Genetic Programming for Motif Discovery, Ranking and Classification
With Prof. Denis Shields and Tiberiu Simu we are investigating the use of Genetic Programming approaches to the Discovery, Ranking and Classification of Protein Motifs involved with Protein-Protein interaction. This research is funded under a UCD Ad Astra Scholarship.

Adaptive Clustering using SOSwarm
UCD's NCRA are developing a novel Particle Swarm Algorithm called Self-Organising Swarm (SOSwarm) for clustering. We are currently focusing on the application of this clustering algorithm for the analysis of Gene Expression data including datasets from both Microarray and Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing (MPSS) experiments.

PCR Primer Design
In collaboration with Dr. Catherine Adley and Brian Adley (University of Limerick) we compared the performance of existing primer design algorithms for PCR and developing a novel approach using Grammatical Evolution.

Functional Modelling using Grammatical Evolution
UCD's NCRA are developing Grammatical Evolution to generate Functional Models from Expression data experiments including Microarrays and Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing (MPSS).