Department of Biochemistry Core Facilities |
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Bioinformatics
Introduction |
Funding |
Achievements |
BioInformatics Resources |
Links |
Workshops |
Contacts |
Introduction
BioInformatics Center (BIC), the first bioinformatics core facility arising from the Bioinformatics User and Support Group in 1991, was founded in 1996 as a national Bioinformatics Centre and has since been providing core facility support and training for research and teaching in undergraduate modules.
Funding
Funded first by EDB in 1996, and hosted in NUS, the Bioinformatics Centre's cutting edge research and resources was a key factor in helping to attract pharmaceutical companies to set up research labs in Singapore then. Its funding was then transferred to the NSTB, which used it to lay the foundation for setting up the A*STAR Bioinformatics Institute BII in 2001. Bioinformatics Centre continued to exist as an NUS Bioinformatics Centre to provide computational research and teaching resources at NUS, occasionally providing friendly support and advice to GIS, IMCB and BII. From 1998 to date, it is a core facility used in teaching undergraduates in BM1106, LSM2104, LSM2241, LSM3241, MDG5101 directly and other modules informally, including the funded training of 20 postgraduates in Bioinformatics from 2002 to 2008. It runs ad hoc workshops every year to researchers on how to use Bioinformatics techniques. It has leveraged on funding from the Bioinformatics Programme of the Life Science Institute LSI, space support from the Biochemistry Department where computer facilities and research labs are hosted, as well as computing power from Computer Centre's TeraCampus Grid and the Supercomputing Visualisation Lab from early 2000s to date. It is also host to the first bioinformatics node and secretariat of the APEC-TEL-endorsed Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet) which has been coordinating one of Asia's most successful premier international conferences (InCoB) now in its tenth year since 2002 and internationally renowned bioinformatics outreach programmes to Asia and beyond by the S* Life Science Informatics Alliance of NUS, Stanford University, Swedish universities of Uppsala and Karolinska, University of Sydney, South Africa National Bioinformatics Institute, University of California San Diego, through an inter-university MoU in 2001. Its resources are also funded by two NIH sub-contracts and one EUAsiaGrid EC infrastructure contract.
Achievements
For the past 15 years, BIC is the only generic, non-project-based Core Facility serving the NUS community in Bioinformatics hosting databases of the international Bio-Mirrors consortium, representing Singapore, including an official mirror of the Protein DataBank PDB from 200X to 200X providing grid computing services since 2002; from 2001 to 2003, a Cray X1 supercomputing service for Bioinformatics; from 2007, a bioinformatics Linux distribution BioSLAX; a completed project endorsed by ASEAN COST; since 2010 the first cloud computing bioinformatics system for teaching and research use; and since 2011, the BioDB100 cloud reinstantiable database repository.
BioInformatics Resources
Links
Workshops
Data Analytics Seminar and Hands-on Bioinformatics Workshop on R
Date: Thursday, 8th September 2011
Venue: Block MD7, Level 2, M9 Seminar Room, Department of Biochemistry, NUS
Website: http://trg.apbionet.org/r/
- Seminar: Data Analytics, Trends and Importance of Big Data in Biology, Hard Sciences, Business and the Arts
Keynote Speaker: Jeff Erhardt, COO, Revolution Analytics
Time: 3.30 pm – 4.30 pm
- Afternoon Tea: 4.30 pm – 5.00 pm (sponsored by 1DegreeNorth)
- Hands-On Workshop: Hands-On Practical Parallel Computing in R for Bioinformatics
Trainer: Dr. Xie Chao, Senior Researcher, Life Sciences Institute, National University of Singapore
Time: 5.00 pm – 6.30 pm
Contacts
**For enquiries, please contact A/P Tan Tin Wee, Mark De Silva or Lim Kuan Siong**
