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Bioinformatics support
We have excellent bioinformatics facilities and support based in the School.
Ashworth Bioinformatics Support Service
The Ashworth Bioinformatics Support Service provides advice, training, software and bespoke support for researchers in the Institutes of Evolutionary Biology and Immunology & Infection Research and the Centre for Immunity, Infection and Evolution. We provide advice on the best bioinformatics tools, bioinformatics skills training such as courses on the R programming language, and software licences for common packages such as Sequencher and Geneious. We are also able to provide bespoke support for particular projects, assisting with experimental design and bioinformatics analysis. Full details can be found on our website.
GenePool Genomics Facility
The GenePool Genomics Facility offers bespoke bioinformatics support to all collaborators using the facility for Sanger, Roche 454 and SIllumina Solexa sequencing projects. A team of bioinformatics specialists, we have skills in:
- Genome assembly de novo
- Mapping to genome references including targeted resequencing
- Transcriptome assembly
- Digital transcriptomics
- ChIPSeq
- SmallRNA sequencing
- Other areas of next-generation genomics
We are happy to offer 'bioinformatics only' collaborations.
NextGen Bioinformatics Journal Club
We hold a weekly NextGen Bioinformatics Journal Club where we discuss recent papers and software, with a particular focus on understanding algorithms and tools for large scale analyses. If you want to be put on the mailing list for this meeting, please contact us.
Next Generation Bioinformatics User Group
We also coordinate the Next Generation Bioinformatics User Group, a Scotland-wide, bimonthly gathering where bioinformaticians across the area meet, present their work, listen to invited speakers and discuss issues and solutions. The meetings rotate round the Scottish universities. NextGenBUG also sponsors workshops on related topics such as genome assembly: these happen about every six months to coincide with NextGenBUG meetings.
Wellcome Trust for Cell Biology: Bioinformatics Core Facility
This facility provides wide ranging support primarily for the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology although access to facilities, training and support may be available to other members of the School of Biological Sciences on request.
Training
An autumn seminar series and an Easter practical series that are integrated into the Wellcome 4 year PhD programme but are open for others to attend.
Facilities
Shared workstations with the COIL facility as well as several dedicated bioinformatics servers hosting:
- Galaxy server containing around 300 bioinformatics tools, biological workflows, data libraries for sharing large datasets, collaboration functions and data visualisation. Note that the Galaxy server is currently being developed for use with the Linux cluster 'Eddie' in collaboration with EDCF
- BLAST server for searching custom databases
- EMBOSS and EMBASSY suite of tools
- GBrowse, GBrowse2 and a Distributed Annotation Server [DAS] for data
- Visualisation and data sharing
- Latest versions of Bioconductor (R), BioPerl, BioPython and BioRuby
- Latest next-generation sequence assemblers including BowTie, Novoalign and Velvet
- Many more bioinformatics programs, including HMMER, GLIMMER and the nucleosome predictor from the Segal lab
Analysis
We perform a wide range of requests encompassing both focused analysis of single locus/gene/protein and the analysis of high throughput data such as microarray, next-generation sequence and pre-processed proteomics data.
This article was published on Jun 4, 2010