Welcome to the Computational Comparative Genomics Lab led by Jian Ma in the Department of Bioengineering and the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The success of the Human Genome Project has ushered in a new era in which biology has become an information science. More recently, the rapid advancement in ultra high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies underlines the urgent need for more innovative computational research in modern biology, for generating, analyzing, and understanding massive amount of genomic data to develop and evaluate biological hypotheses.

Our long-term research goal is to understand how phenotype (at the cellular and organism levels) is generated from genotype and to shed new light on disease mechanisms, such as cancer. Our interdisciplinary work combines genomics, computational innovation, engineering principles, and medical sciences. We develop novel computational methods to explore the human genome, integrating comparative genomics data to elucidate cross-species differences and within-species variation and their associations with disease. We develop new systems biology approaches to identifying key genetic variants in cancer development and progression using high-throughput next-generation sequencing technologies.

What's New

01/10/2013. RACA is published by PNAS [news] [software].
05/14/2012. We received a 2-year grant from the Interdisciplinary Innovation Initiative (In3) program.
05/11/2012. We received a Junior Cancer Investigator Pilot grant from UI Cancer Center to study prostate cancer.
02/21/2012. We received an R21 grant from NIH/NHGRI to study conserved non-coding elements.
02/01/2012. Jaebum joined Konkuk University (Seoul, Korea) as an Assistant Professor.
12/19/2011. Yang's TrueSight paper has been accepted by RECOMB 2012.
12/01/2011. Jian is named one of "Tomorrow's PIs" by Genome Technology magazine [cover].
05/13/2011. We received Arnold O. Beckman Award from the University to study genome aberration in cancer.
03/12/2011. Peter's work has been selected for oral presentation at the 2011 Undergrad Research Symposium.
12/06/2010. Jaebum's PSAR paper has been accepted by RECOMB 2011.
11/16/2010. We will receive NSF CAREER Award to study large-scale genomic changes in mammalian genomes.
08/16/2009. We received a faculty fellowship from NCSA.
08/16/2009. Our lab started officially.