The problem at hand is hierarchical in nature, with the hierarchy spanning many levels. Each of these levels can be thought of as comprising multiple active agents that are diverse in their nature (e.g. genes, proteins, pathways, organelles, etc) and also in their behavior. It is within this setting that one seeks to build an integrated view of the system under study, as soon as the relevant units and the complex inter- and intra-level relationships in which these units participate have been characterized.

Implicit in the above outline are the assumptions that a) a complete and presumably correct list of parts exists for the system that is being studied; and, b) most, if not all, of the relevant relationships involving these parts are available.

Through the research work of my group and of others, there is increasing evidence that the situation is likely to be more complicated than initially estimated, and that one should be watchful when it comes to making or relying on the above two assumptions. In fact, more surprising and currently undiscovered things may be lurking in the ?genomics? box: support for this possibility will be provided through the brief summaries of recent advances that we have made in diverse areas such as association discovery, gene discovery, horizontal gene transfer and RNA interference. Throughout this quest, repositories of biological information will continue to remain our guiding light, whereas time-honored computational methods will continue to be the mainstay of our arsenal.

Dr. Rigoutsos is a Fulbright Scholar, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), a member of the American Society for Microbiology, and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2003, Dr. Rigoutsos was elected a Fellow of the Americal Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He is the author/co-author of numerous peer-reviewed publications, and holds 13 U.S. and 2 European patents. He is an Associate Editor for the journal "Genomics," a member of the Editorial Board for the journals "Human Genomics" and "Briefings in Bioinformatics," a Founding Editorial Board Member of the "International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications," an Associate Member of the Editorial Board of "Gene Therapy and Molecular Biology," and a Founding Member of the Hellenic Society for Computational Biology.

Dr. Rigoutsos' research interests revolve primarily around the use of pattern discovery as a tool for tackling problems from computational biology such as motif discovery in biological sequences, multiple sequence alignment, the analysis of gene expression data, the functional and structural annotation of amino acid sequences, the characterization and prediction of local 3D structure directly from sequence data, the discovery of genes in prokaryotic organisms, etc. Currently, a large part of his time is devoted to the annotation of prokaryotic/eukaryotic genomes, the discovery and analysis of antimicrobial peptides, the study of the RNA interference phenomenon, the study of horizontal gene transfer, the study of non-canonical deformations of transmembrane helices, and the study of the human herpesviridae.