The groups we were

 

Groups

• Biostatistics and Mathematics
• Chemistry and Biochemistry
• Environmental Chemistry and Physics
• Nanobioscience

 

  

Our research included

• Agohydrology
• Bioinorganic chemistry
• Agricultural chemistry
• Land use and environmental chemistry
• Organic chemistry
• Biochemistry
• Mathematics
• Statistics
• Physics/biophysics
• Computer science
• Bioinformatics

 

To a great extent, the research projects are still taking place, only now in the respective departments of where the individual research groups got placed at the split-up of IGM in 2012 June.

 

We took part in large research projects and research centres within the fields of bioinformatics, image analysis with applications to agriculture and forestry, biotechnology, non-food, dairy & food chemistry, and environmental chemistry.

 

The goal was to achieve a thorough understanding of the physical proporties and the chemistry of biological systems and thus be a part of the development of sustainable models for structure, composition and function af natural systems. 

 

Areas of research were among others:

 

• Synthesis, analysis, structure and biological activity of, e.g., peptides, proteins, and secondary metabolites.
• The function of metals in enzymes.
• The soil and environmental chemistry of natural plant toxins and added contaminants such as heavy metals, agro chemicals and domestic chemicals.
• Mathematics applications in biology and population dynamics, especially matrix models.
• Mathematics applications in agriculture. Harmonic analysis, Lie groups and symmetric spaces. Functional analysis and function theory.
• Interplay between coordination geometry of zinc andcopper and protein structure in metalloproteins studied by perturbed angularcorrelation of gamma-rays (PAC spectroscopy).
• Protein aggregation,protein-membrane interactions studied by light, X-ray and neutron scattering.
• The field of biometry and statistics covers statistical methods and their applications to other fields at KU LIFE, in particular to biological investigations dealing with plants and animals as well as foods and human nutrition. Biological variation is usually substantial, therefore we often apply models with various random effects (the so-called mixed models) to take different sources of variation into account.

 

The department provided extensive consultancy services to other researchers and students at KU LIFE in the fields of statistics, biometry and isotope techniques.

 

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PLEASE NOTICE: There will for a while - for miscellaneous administrative reasons - still be references (automatically generated by IT-systems) to the old research group names. The old groups were:

 

• Agrohydrology
• Biochemistry & Natural Product Chemistry
• Bioinorganic Chemistry
• Bioorganic Chemistry
• Biophysics
• Mathematics & Computer Science
• Soil and Environmental Chemistry
• Statistics