Bioinformatics Shared Resource

Computational Resources and Services

Do you need help analyzing your next-gen sequencing data?  Or performing a biological network analysis to see what pathways may be affected by the differentially expressed genes from your microarray experiment?  Would visualizing the structural impact of SNPs on your genes of interest help you generate hypotheses about disease mechanisms or drug targets?  Do you have clinical  data collection or management needs? BISR faculty and staff can provide a free, initial consultation on your projects – from advice on choosing what analyses could be most insightful for your studies, to organizing your clinical datasets, to running your data through our bioinformatics pipelines to help you answer your research questions.

Most requested areas of consultation and support:

  • REDCap; TONIC
  • Data integration and clinical data management
  • Molecular profiling analysis; Next Generation Sequencing data analysis
  • Pharmacogenomics analysis
  • Cohort discovery from EHRs
  • Training in bioinformatics resources and tools
  • Bioinformatics software development
  • Computational chemistry / Molecular modeling Systems biology analysis / Network modeling and Inference

Computational Resources and Software available at BISR include:

  • Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is a secure cloud platform for research and education developed by ICBI and managed by the BISR. VRE leverages the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for provisioning computing resources, and securely storing and sharing data. VRE was designed and developed to overcome barriers faced by researchers while complying with institutions’ state and federal policies and regulations. VRE is being developed to become the preferred secure cloud service for research, education and data sharing needs. When used appropriately, VRE can also be used to store, manage, and analyze electronic protected health information (ePHI). 
  • VRE also enables investigators to use and share de-identified/standardized data with various research networks. VRE is a multi-mission platform that can facilitate the advancement of science, education, and services. With this cloud-based computational environment, we utilize scalable and efficient information-technology approaches to handling big data at the terabyte scale.
  • The BISR has also provides access to the Cancer Genomics Cloud (CGC) developed by Seven Bridges, Inc. This genomics focused platform provides secure access to large scale public datasets such as TCGA, CPTAC and TARGET, as well several hundred open source pipelines for genomics data processing and analysis.
  • The BISR consults with investigators and data managers to provide technical solutions for data governance, data security and privacy.