Bioinformatics in TCGA

The completion of the human genome project promises to user in a new era of biomedical advancement, but the path from genome sequence to disease cure is complex and will require significant contributions from the mathematical and information sciences for its illumination. This has created a tremendous amount of data and an equally vast need for computing resources to analyze that data. Unfortunately, not all researchers have access to such computing power, and not all institutions have the ability to acquire such capital intensive resources.

TCGA and its principal academic partner, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), worked together to specify TCGA’s computing needs.

The Bioinformatics Facility of TCGA is responsible for assisting research investigators with access to Internet tools and resources in research and related fields. We also generate computer programs and scripts to collect large data sets, analyze them and display the results on web pages.

The Bioinformatics Facility provides database and data warehouse environments for analysis of biological data on SNPs. We also assist investigators with mining these data in order to discover new relationships within them.

With high-speed LANs and WANs available at the Centre, this high performance scientific computing facility eliminates bottlenecks and provides researchers reliable access to a variety of resources including:

High performance computational tools such as Sequence Alignment, Linkage Analysis, Gene Clustering and Classification, and Multivariate Analysis.

Data management systems such as Sequence, SNP and Expression DB, as well as Gene Ontology.

The combination of cutting-edge technology and the expertise of the TCGA and IGIB staff allow the Centre to offer services in the following areas:

Bioinformatics

High Performance Computing

Knowledge Based Data Management

Our partner, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), and Hewlett Packard (HP) has signed an MoU to use latter's 4 Teraflops (TFLOPS) HP Cluster Platform (288 nodes with two processors for each node) to advance life sciences computational biology research. This High performance supercomputing facility is coming up in the premises of TCGA very shortly.

The supercomputer will enable us to research in complex molecular dynamic simulations, protein structure, and interaction experiments and in silico toxicity studies.\

At present, there are quite a few of M.Sc. (Bioinformatics) students who are doing small research projects for their dissertation. These projects are on small problems which have a potential to grow into complete research projects.