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Bioinformatics

The Roslin Institute develops and maintains a number of publicly available database systems.

Bioinformatics is a very broad subject area, but for our purposes it can be defined as the storage, manipulation and analysis of biological information using computer science. Bioinformatics is an essential infrastructure underpinning modern biological research.

At The Roslin Institute, we provide databases and applications supporting the international animal science community. These include:

resSpecies A generic, species-independent database and associated web application designed to handle pedigrees, genetic markers, genotypes, allele descriptions and traits. It provides tools for checking the Mendelian inheritance of sets of genotypes at submission and separate tools for exporting data to the formats expected by a wide variety of standard analysis tools.
ArkDB  A generic, species-independent database built to capture the state of published information on genome mapping in a given species. It stores details of references, markers and loci and genetic linkage and cytogenetic maps which can be drawn using the online map-drawing application. Data from linkage maps held within the ArkDB system can be drawn alongside their corresponding genome sequence maps (extracted from ENSEMBL).
ArkMAP

Desktop application that allows users to draw and align genetic maps.

GMD data format

A simple generic XML schema to allow export and exchange of mapping data in a common lightweight XML document format. This schema represents the various types of data objects commonly described across mapping datasources and provides a mechanism for recording relationships between data objects.

Genotype Checker

A Desktop application for checking the inheritance consistency of pedigree/genotype data.

VIPER

A Desktop application for exploring and cleaning inheritance inconsistencies within pedigree/genotype data.

Haplofinder

A simple python script designed to simplify identification of possible haplotype pairs when presented with an ambiguous sequence trace derived from a diploid organism.

JEnsembl

A proof-of-concept implementation of an Ensembl API that demonstrates the tractability accessing Ensembl datasources at Ensembl and EnsemblGenomes using Java.
DISSECT Powerful software for massive genomic analyses.

We also provide internal Institute-specific development, training and support roles for data manipulation, sequence analysis and any other aspect of the analysis of biological data using computer systems.

Roslin Bioinformatics

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