The GenoMik-Transfer Technology Platform Bioinformatics

Research in the field of genome and metagenome analysis is currently pushed forward by ultrafast high-throughput sequencing technologies of the companies 454 Life Sciences, Illumina Inc. and Applied Biosciences. The main benefit of these new technologies is a dramatical reduction in both the sequencing costs and the complexity of the required experimental setups.

In a multitude of sequencing projects the rewards of these new technologies could already be reaped a development, however, that has also resulted in a vast increase in sequence data just waiting to be analyzed. The requirements placed on bioinformatics include not only the assembly and functional annotation of pro- and eukaryotic sequence data but also the comparative analysis of closely related species or strains as well as studies of the composition of microbial communities taken from different ecosystems.

The Technology Platform Bioinformatics can look back on many years of expertise in the computational processing of genomic and post-genomic datasets. Already during the research initiatives "GenoMik" and "GenoMik-Plus" funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the platform served as a central bioinformatics service provider for project partners. Within the GenoMik-Transfer initiative, collaboration partners are offered a comprehensive infrastructure for data storage and analysis. A high performance compute infrastructure facilitates the detailed processing of experimental data in a timely manner.

For this purpose, the Technology Platform Bioinformatics provides access to a variety of bioinformatics tools and software applications ranging from functional genome analysis and metagenomics to transcriptomics, metabolomics, and proteomics. In our application development special attention is always paid to the design of user-friendly interfaces and an easy and straight-forward usability. Currently, the list of software packages provided by Bielefeld includes i) GenDB for the annotation and maintenance of complete genomes, ii) SAMS for the analysis and management of individual sequences, iii) EDGAR for the comparative analysis of closely related genomes, iv) EMMA as a platform for the processing of transcriptome datasets as well as a wide range of further applications from the fields metagenomics, proteomics and metabolomics.

The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant number 0315599A and 0315599B. The technology platform Bioinformatics is funded within the "GenoMik-Transfer" program that aims on promoting the application-oriented research on non-pathogenic microorganisms for health, nutrition and ressource-efficient industry production in Germany. Further information about GenoMik-Transfer can be found on the official project web site.