Services & Charges

Bioinformatics support is given to peer-reviewed grants, pilot studies, new investigators, and analyses for publication. All bioinformatics development efforts of the Bioinformatics Core (BC) will be in compliance with evolving standards articulated by the National Institute of Health (NIH) especially the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the scientific community, and standard-setting organizations in the biomedical informatics and bioinformatics areas. Currently, the members in the BC are paid directly from individual grants or from institutional support. We are structuring a chargeback system that will allow for the BC members to be available to investigators with grants who need a dedicated portion of an FTE of a bioinformatician.

There will be a single per hour charge for consultation through the portal system.
Internal clients will be charged $70 per hour and external clients will be charged $100 per hour.

The Bioinformatics Core provides services in six major areas:

Experimental/study design, database design and programming: Bioinformaticians provide input on appropriate methodology and proper choice of study populations and sampling techniques at the inception of a study. Sample size computations are provided to ensure that the planned study will have adequate statistical power. Randomization schemes and schedules are prepared for intervention and clinical trials. Consultation on design issues of complex relational as well as hierarchical information/database systems will also be provided. Computer programmers within the BC will develop these systems with consultation from investigators and users, and are also available for consultation to researchers developing database systems. Computer programmers routinely use Visual Basic, Visual C++, Structured Query Language (SQL) and Microsoft Access for database programming.

Data collection, management, storage, extraction, sharing, integration and synthesis of data sets: Bioinformaticians provide input on the development of new data collection forms and revision to existing ones, focusing on consistent collection of data. Advice is given on how best to code open-ended questions for ease of use at analysis. We provide consultation on data management issues to ensure that the complex data from diverse sources (e.g. ranging from molecular sequence data to microarray data to clinical data) can be aggregated in appropriate ways. The BC will aid researchers in publishing their data for use by others, if desired. Computer programmers provide consultation to investigators on appropriate ways to structure, retrieve/extract, integrate or set up specific data sets for downstream statistical and/or bioinformatics data analysis.

Computer software review and algorithm development: Bioinformaticians review and develop computer software tools/algorithms and provide investigators with software recommendation to meet their needs. We have expertise in general common programming languages and tools such as HTML, JAVA, C, C++, Matlab, Mathematica, Perl, Python, Visual Basic and Visual C++; as well as specialized bioinformatics tools such as R, Bioconductor packages and NCI’s mAdb (http://nciarray.nci.nih.gov/).

Bioinformatics support in genomics, proteomics and translational research:
Bioinformaticians provide consultation and support on use of genomics and proteomics resources available for public use, such as the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) resources (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/), The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) resources (http://www.tigr.org/), and the Protein Data Bank (PDB) resources (http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/). In particular, advanced computational expertise in software design and programming support of bioinformatics tools for genetic data, molecular sequence data, genomic/proteomic data, and support for biomolecular structure simulation and visualization programs will be provided. Bioinformaticians will also help integrate bioinformatics tools and data management systems in an interactive environment for investigators to use for translational research. In addition to our massive in house clinical data, information on data sources for mammalian genetics (e.g. the Mouse Genome Informatics at the Jackson Laboratory http://www.informatics.jax.org/), a variety of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data, standardized microarray data and clinical information (e.g. the NCI Center for Bioinformatics’ cancer Bioinformatics Infrastructure Objects (caBIO) interface http://ncicb.nci.nih.gov/NCICB/infrastructure/cacore_overview/caBIO) will be compiled, compared and used.

Data analysis: Bioinformaticians develop an analysis plan (jointly with investigators) which includes selection of appropriate bioinformatics and computational approaches and models. Bioinformaticians assess whether the data appropriately satisfy model assumptions and discuss results of the bioinformatics analyses with the study investigators. These consultative interactions on bioinformatics analysis allow investigators to analyze their data with the most appropriate bioinformatics techniques.

Interpretation and dissemination of results: Advice is given on the interpretation of the results from models, and the display of data in tabular and graphical form. Bioinformaticians also aid in the preparation of manuscripts, especially in the writing of technical bioinformatics sections, and often serve as coauthors on papers where they have substantive input.