The Barbazuk lab, a bioinformatics Lab at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center at St. Louis, studies genome architecture, function and evolution. Our interests lie in attempting to understand plant genome architecture, function and evolution. In order to address these questions, genome sequences and well-established catalogues of genes and their positions within the genome are required. As more and more genome data becomes available, the methods used to catalogue genes become more robust, and ultimately the questions of genome organization, gene interaction and regulation can be addressed.

Most of lab current focus is on cereal genomes (particularly maize, rice and sorghum), where we apply comparative analysis and computational methods to investigate gene structure, gene content, gene/genome organization and regulation with the goal of applying this knowledge to affect cereal crop improvement.