Introduction to the Butte Lab
The long-term research goal of the Butte Lab is to develop bioinformatics methods in integrative biology, or reasoning over the many available genome-scale measurement and experimental modalities, and apply these methods to study complex disorders in genomic medicine, especially obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus.
The Butte Lab has three main directions in exploring integrative biology. First, we have developed bioinformatics methods to integrate genomic, genetic, phenotypic, and RNAi data from multiple sources and phenotypes and reason over these data. An example of this was our work in adipogenesis published in Nature Cell Biology (2005) and our work in obesity published in Bioinformatics (2007). Second, we have developed tools to automatically index and find genomic and proteomic data sets based on the phenotypic and contextual details of each experiment. We used these tools to create a comprehensive phenome-genome network published in Nature Biotechnology (2006), using tools published in Nature Methods (2007). Third, we are building novel classification scheme for diseases across the entire field of medicine, using clinical data, as we described in Science (2008), and using gene-expression data, as described in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune.
The Butte Lab is in the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research (formally Stanford Medical Informatics or SMI), in the Department of Medicine and Department of Pediatrics, in the Stanford University School of Medicine, and is a core faculty laboratory in the Biomedical Informatics Training Program at Stanford University.
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