An experimental biologist who examines the field of computational biology will find a broad spectrum of approaches. One way of looking at this spectrum is to identify its extremes. On the far right are the pure theoreticians for whom biology is a provocative intellectual arena in which to prove theorems and perhaps develop new mathematics. On the far left are the modelers who carefully and effectively extract new information from the current data set, but who, on principle, do not include in their model information obtained from other data sets in other labs.
BioInformatics Services is, on this scale, a left-of-center organization. We are data-centered, but discipline aware. We are convinced that the real power of modeling lies in the direct comparison of experimental data with model predictions. This, we believe, is the most powerful way to test any hypothesis or model, and it is in this sense that BioInformatics Services is data-centered.
On the other hand, we think it's critical that the first hypothesis or model we test is the one our client has in mind. We are expert in the process of converting an investigator's working hypothesis into the differential equations of a model, and we always start by doing so. Moreover, we incorporate constraints in our models based on our clients' and our joint understanding of the relevant primary scientific literature. Only in this way can we justify our claim to be doing integrative biology, and it is in this sense that BioInformatics Services is discipline-aware.