I'm a bioinformatician in the bioinformatics group of the Max-Planck Institute for biochemistry in Munich, Germany. In our group we have a broad research focus that is mainly dedicated to help solving biological problems. We achieve this by a very close interaction with researchers in biological research labs, located here at the MPI-B in Munich, as well as in many other research institutions around the globe. Due to these close ties with a biological research environment, we are partly dedicating our efforts to the development of bioinformatics tools and databases that will help advance biological sciences.