Bioinformatics Shared Resource

Roswell Park Cancer Institute Corp, Buffalo NY

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

The mission of the Bioinformatics Shared Resource (BIOINF) is to provide state-of-art bioinformatics expertise for the design, analysis, and interpretation of genomics, proteomics, and other high-resolution, high-throughput studies for better understanding of cancer biology, thereby facilitating translation of cancer omics discoveries to cancer treatment. The BIOINF ensures that CCSG investigators have ready access to expert bioinformatics support and services to carry out basic science, translational, clinical, and population-oriented research. BIOINF served a total of 122 Roswell users, of which 90 (74%) were CCSG members. The BIOINF has provided critical value-added bioinformatics services to CCSG programs as evidenced by co-authoring 150 peer-review manuscripts, and serving as co-investigators and/or bioinformaticians on 47 extramural grants. Electronic computational and storage space is a large component in bioinformatics data collection and analysis. The BIOINF takes advantage of two locally available computing resources necessary to provide high-level bioinformatics support. First, through collaboration with the Roswell Park IT department, we have maintained a high-performance cluster with 1,600 processors and 600 TB of high-performance storage. Second, through a formal collaboration with the Center for Computational Research (CCR) at UB, we have ready access to the Linux cluster with more than 8,000 processor cores and 3 PB of high-performance storage. The Specific Aims of the BIOINF: 1) To collaborate with project investigators by providing methodologic and analytic expertise including study design and conduct, development and implementation of data analytic plans, and interpretation of analysis results; 2) To develop and disseminate innovative open-source bioinformatics software packages; 3) To provide bioinformatics education and training to the cancer center community. The goal of the BIOINF is to continuously supply rigorous and efficient bioinformatics solutions necessary to address the clinical, translational and basic science questions of the investigators we support. Future efforts will focus on developing novel bioinformatics tools to handle emerging and diverse high-throughput data and collaborating with BDS to initiate a joint quarterly educational program for Roswell Park investigators on understanding and using data science to strengthen their research.