Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that includes biology, informatics, computer science, mathematics, statistics, and other medical sciences and is used to analyze systems biology and genomic data and to predict the structure and function of target proteins.The Bioinformatics/Computational Chemistry Core is a major resource for developing and applying new computational and statistical tools for the analysis and interpretation of complex biochemical data.

Computational Chemistry efforts currently focus on the human cannabinoid (CB) receptors that belong to the rhodopsin-class G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). Some physiologically important members of this family of receptors include: chemokine receptors, opioid receptors, adrenergic receptors, and muscarinic acetylcholine receptors. With a significant advance in GPCR structure determination, core personnel study the molecular details, structure, and function of the CB receptors whose x-ray structures are not available.

Bioinformatics & Genomics activities include data mining, Gene Wide Association Study (GWAS) data analysis, comparative genomic analyses, and application/method development. Current projects focus on determinants of obesity and hypertension in African Americans. Using regression, SVM, Random Forests, and Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction, models of disease are constructed using biological, environmental, and psychosocial variables.