The key missions of this interdisciplinary Institute include (a) facilitating interactions and research collaborations between experimental biologists, -omics technologists and computational/mathematical scientists to tackle complex biological problems, and (b) training the next generation of biologists who are capable of using computers and mathematical techniques in dealing with biological problems.  The Institute is also responsible for the computing support for campus wide bioinformatics research at UGA.  IOB members are actively conducting bioinformatics research in a wide range of areas, ranging from structural genomics and bioinformatics, plant genomics and  bioinformatics, microbial genomics and bioinformatics, biomedical and cancer bioinformatics, pharmaco informatics, glyco genomics and bioinformatics, to computational and statistical sciences for bioinformatics.