The development of high-throughput omics technologies such as genomics and proteomics, has been a major breakthrough in biomedical research, enabling researchers to see both deeper and broader than ever before. Especially the latter has been important as it makes it possible to move from hypothesis driven research, for example, in-depth analysis of how a specific set of proteins react to a given stimulus; towards a more exploratory approach, for example, quantify all proteins in a given sample and explore the results in an unbiased manner.

This breakthrough has made it possible to ask new types of research questions, for example: “What are the differences between two disease categories in terms of protein expression?” or “Is it possible to find differentially expressed proteins, so-called biomarkers, that can be used to distinguish these groups?”.

In this landscape the Barsnes Group is working on developing a research-based bioinformatics framework that makes it easier to employ state-of-the-art bioinformatics and statistics on omics data, while at the same time providing interactive and visual integration of the findings in the context of the current biomedical knowledge – thus bridging the current gap between project specific high-throughput omics analyses and novel biomedical knowledge.