The Barton Group | Bioinformatics Research | Division of Computational Biology | School of Life Sciences

Barton Group Banner

Welcome to Geoff Barton's Research Group in the Division of Computational Biology, School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee.

Hover to pause image scrolling, click to learn more.

Explore published ligand-protein interactions in context with evolution, human genetic variation and likely function for>26,000 structures and 435,000 ligands or upload your own data for analysis!

Barton Group July 2025

A group meeting in July 2025

Left to Right: Geoff, James, Khadija, Renia, Stuart, Ben, Javier, Jim.

Ligand LIGYSIS-Benchmark

Comprehensive benchmark of Machine Learning methods for ligand site prediction

See how the LIGYSIS database was used to identify challenges in developing and evaluating methods to predict ligand binding sites on proteins.

UMD and UME

Evolutionary conservation and human population variation in protein families

Discover the power of combining evolutionary and population constraint data on protein structures.

Jalview

The free Jalview visualisation, sequence alignment and data integration workbench

With over 100,000 users,>1,000,000 uses per year and>10,000 citations to papers describing it, Jalview is one of the most widely used interactive tools in molecular biology. Explore evolution, protein structure, human genetic variation and much, much more!

ELIXIR-UK

We are pleased our resources Jalview and DRSASP (which includes Jpred) were selected as UK Tier 1 Resources in the Elixir Network.

Jalview JPred

Featured Software and Servers

You can browse our Software and Databases page for details, but some highlights developed by the group are:

Ligysis Jalview Jabaws JPred PIPs

More...

Outreach Activities

Our main outreach activities centre on Jalview and the Dundee Resource. See the Jalview activities for schools and the YouTube Channel.

We developed the GenomeScroller exhibit to visualise the human genome in real-time.

Read our essay on The UK Academic System — an overview of scientific careers, funding, and titles in the UK.

Funding and Featured Collaborations

Our core funding for Jalview, Jpred, and related tools comes from the BBSRC and Wellcome Trust.

We have a longstanding BBSRC collaboration with Prof Gordon Simpson on RNA processing, including work on polyadenylation via Direct RNA Sequencing.