Bioinformatics and Computing Resources

Hartwell Center users have access to Bioinformatics and Research Computing resources pertinent to their studies through services provided by Computational Biology and Information Sciences departments.

Bioinformatics support

The Computational Biology department has extensive Bioinformatics resources to support microarray, sequencing and proteomic data analyses. This includes an expert team of 16 Ph.D.-level Bioinformatics staff members with extensive and multi-disciplinary experience in high dimensional data analysis and biological interpretation. All staff members have Ph.D.'s in the life sciences as well as publications in bioinformatics and computer programming skills. Services include analyzing gene expression data, proteomics data, chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP)-chip experiments, chromosomal abnormalities, multiple sequence alignments, phylogenetic trees, and other multi-dimensional data arising from high throughput biotechnologies.

Computer Facilities

Information Sciences provides an enterprise-wide range of high-end computational resources, networking, security, application and web server hosts, storage and backup solutions and databases environments. The computational infrastructure includes a 2,400 CPU Linux cluster with over 11 terabytes of RAM which provides state-of-the-art resources to perform CPU-intensive bioinformatics and statistical tasks. We also maintain over 100 physical and 120 virtual servers to support a wide range of bioinformatics applications; including server-based applications such as the Staden suite, Phred/Phrap for contig assembly, R, PDQ-Med, Sequest, Mascot, Protein Prospector, and many other genomics and proteomics applications as well as a host of structural biology applications; and cluster-based applications such as mpiBLAST, Amber, Consensus, etc. Databases supported on-site include Genbank, EMBL, Swiss-Prot, PIR, SP-TREMBL, PROSITE, REBASE, HGBase, dbSNP, TRANSFAC, etc.