Bioformatics

Formally established by the institution in 2006 to address the growing demand for bioinformatics expertise at Mayo Clinic, the Bioinformatics Core Shared Resource (BIC) is a new shared resource of the Cancer Center. The mission of the Shared Resource is to assist Mayo Clinic Cancer Center (MCCC) investigators in leveraging intramural and extramural sources of biological information to promote discoveries that will impact patient care. To this end, the BIC offers a suite of services to support investigators with the manipulation, preprocessing, and interpretation of genomics, microarray, and proteomics data. These services include: sequence analysis and comparative genomics; gene and SNP selection for association studies; data parsing and formatting; gene ID conversion, biological pathway and networks analysis; data preprocessing; including quality control; and management and education regarding public and local databases and bioinformatics applications. BIC has assembled a team of 13 computer scientists and 12 bioinformatics experts who work collaboratively with biostatisticians to provide analytical support to investigators at all three Mayo campuses. NCI related goals for bioinformatics is assured by dedicated Shared Resource support for the evaluation and integration of caBIG projects into Mayo's infrastructure. BIC provides critical 'value-add' to MCCC investigators in providing (i) investigator support during planning and execution of high throughput experiments; (ii) development of bioinformatics tools and education programs; and (iii) infrastructure for experimental techniques and analytical methods validation, including quality control workflows for genotyping data, preprocessing workflows for gene expression profiles, validation of copy number variation, and high throughput sequencing; and platforms for data integration and mining. Over the past year, BIC has supported 36 MCCC investigators, accounting for more than 50% of the Shared Resource's total usage, and offered 22 classes and training programs attended by more than 40 MCCC investigators and personnel.