BioInformatics Resources
BIC consists of cross-disciplinary engineers who are highly skilled in almost all aspects of IT and yet have enough knowledge in the areas of biology to make their presence indispensable. Their mission is to design, implement and maintain the core life science/IT infrastructure that supports research that is done in the field of bioinformatics. From fixing the smallest problems in Microsoft Windows to writing complex programs to help researchers manipulate the largest databases or analyse and fix networking problems, the team lends their talents to almost anything that is within their capability.
Most important is the team’s tireless effort in helping to propagate bioinformatics resources. The team participates actively as technical consultants in the Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet) as well as in other Asia-Pacific Networking Group (APNG) supported organisations and has recently begun assisting several groups to set up bioinformatics resources and provide individual assistance.
Some of these groups include:
- NUS Department of Biological Sciences Bioinformatics Node
- NUS Bioprocessing Technology Centre Bioinformatics Node
- The National Cancer Centre Bioinformatics Node
The team also assists serveral of scientists on their projects as well as maintain links to many well known external resources like the Protein Databank (PDB) mirrored directly from the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB). Their involment in APBioNet has resulted in active participation of the BioMirrors project, This project provides users with high speed access to these large databases some of which exceed 10 Gigabytes. The project sites are connected with the Internet II infrastructure of vBNS and the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN). Good planning, team cohesiveness and hard work has resulted in a cheap, highly scalable system to house the ever growing data sets with little maintainence.
With the creation of the S-Star Alliance in bioinformatics education, the team has also taken up the added responsibility of providing technical resourses and consultancy for this prestegious collaboration between some of the top univesities in the world. The links below, under Resource Categories, will pop up lists of all the resources both commercial, external and in-house that are available from the center. Update listings and descriptions will help you find the right application you require.
The unit is also starting to test several GRID enabled bio/life science applications on the Tera Campus Grid (TCG) (United Devices GRID-BLAST was a tremendous success) and will be adding them soon. Also feel free to download (when available) our BIC Resource Handbook, which will give you information on what resources are available, how to use them, what kind of regulation apply to the use of applications, the different groups of specialists (PERL programmers, database administrators, etc) who may be able to assist you in any particular area of need and much more.