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Bioinformatics is a new field of research which encompasses mathematics, computer science, biology, medicine and the physical sciences. It has arisen from the need to handle and analyse the vast amounts of data being generated by the new genomics technologies. The interface of these disciplines used to be information-poor, but is now information-mega-rich, and statistics plays a central role in processing this information and making it intelligible. In this talk, I will describe a published bioinformatics study which claimed to have developed a simple test for the early detection of ovarian cancer from a blood sample. The US Food and Drug Administration was on the verge of approving the test kits for market in 2004 when demonstrated flaws in the study design and analysis led to its withdrawal. We are still waiting for an effective early biomarker test for ovarian cancer.

In this talk we consider some statistical analyses of data arising in bioinformatics. The problems include the detection of differential expression in microarray gene-expression data, the clustering of time-course gene-expression data and, lastly, the analysis of modern-day cytometric data. Extensions are considered to the procedures proposed for these three problems in McLachlan et al. (Bioinformatics, 2006), Ng et al. (Bioinformatics, 2006), and Pyne et al. (PNAS, 2009), respectively. The latter references are available at http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~gjm/.