Transcript

Dr Julian Heyes (Plant & Food Research): Bioinformatics is all about looking for patterns in very complex data sets.

Dr Andrew Shelling (Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, The University of Auckland): We are going to be dealing with thousands of patients and a large number of genes.

Dr William Laing (Plant & Food Research): The mircoarrays are done by specialised labs that will generate huge numbers … huge lists of genes and how much they have changed in expression with a particular cell line fed a particular polyphenolic, or fed a tannin, or fed some other chemical from the plant.

Professor Lynn Ferguson (Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, The University of Auckland): Once we’ve got those, how do we pick out what it is that's working? It may be one particular chemical; it may be a mix of chemicals. And we have to use bioinformatics to try and sort out what the food information - what the dietary information is telling us.

Dr Julian Heyes (Plant & Food Research): And so you imagine looking for commonalities amongst ten thousand chemicals that may have been screened.

Dr Warren McNabb (AgResearch): The advancement in computing power is what sits behind it, our ability to do all this biology, to be able to handle 40,000 genes on a single chip, and to look at all of the changes in expression in one experiment.

Dr Martin Philpott (Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, The University of Auckland): And so part of the nutrigenomics programme is to have involvement of not just biologists and people like myself, but also statisticians and people who are called bioinformaticists.