Junaid Gamieldien
- Name: Junaid Gamieldien
- Role: Lecturer
- Contact Details
- Telephone: +27-(0)21-959 3910
- Facsimile: +27-(0)21-959 2512
- Email: junaid(at)sanbi ac za
Research Areas:
As relational database management systems cannot adequately represent the semantic richness and high level of connectedness of biological information, our research focuses on using next-generation graph database technologies for the semantic (meaning-driven) modeling of biological knowledge.
Primary research objectives:
- i. Properly leverage biological ontologies as semantic anchors for knowledge integration.
- ii. Construct several domain-targeted semantic databases (e.g. for health genomics), integrating multiple formal ontologies with genotype-to-phenotype information from multiple species.
- iii. Develop methods that use the resultant meta-ontologies to make sense of genomics experiments.
- iv. Develop a query language and web-interface for performing arbitrarily complex semantic searches.
- v. Develop automated-reasoning methods for discovering novel relationships between biological entities, molecular networks, phenotypes and even existing drugs/interventions.
- vi. Find phenotype- or condition-specific nodes of importance in biological networks by applying well-established network analysis algorithms to the stored graphs.
Figure Caption: The semantic model of our prototype graph database for human health genomics and disease biomarker discovery, which simplifies cross-species and cross-knowledge-domain genotype to phenotype exploration.