This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. In the last few years, there has been a significant renewal in interest by the University of Puerto Rico, the Resource Center for Science and Engineering (RCSE) and Puerto Rico-EPSCoR in expanding High Performance Computing and Communications resources available to the UPR community. Direct consequences of this interest were the creation, in October of 1997, of the High Performance Computing facility (HPCf) of the UPR, as well as the development of the Internet2 project for Puerto Rico. Since its creation, the High Performance Computing facility has been active in developing a technology infrastructure with support services to the research and education community of the University as a whole. With the present proposal, we commit ourselves to expand the High Performance Computing facility of the University of Puerto Rico with the intent of creating the Bioinformatics Research Center. This shared core facility would contain high-end hardware, software and services essential to all researchers and educators in molecular biology at the institutions identified in the present proposal, with specific tools to support the members of the three research clusters : Neurobiology, Mental Health and Medical Biotechnology. Although the use of computers in the biological sciences has occurred for many decades, bioinformatics is a fairly new scientific field, made possible by the convergence of data-intensive biological and medical sciences research, laboratory-automation technologies, and the development of computer databases and algorithms that can rapidly organize, process, and distribute enormous quantities of data. The areas we consider as essential to be developed and supported at the Bioinformatics Resource Center are: 1- genomic databases 2- sequence analysis software 3- phylogeny software 4- protein structure visualization 5- protein structure prediction 6- bioinformatics programming 7- microarray data visualization and analysis 8- biostatistics 9- research support services &training These areas will be described with respect to the establishment of the core, detailing presently available resources as well as those resources to be obtained through the present proposal. We will then briefly describe each cluster along with their proposed use of the bioinformatics core, consequently presenting a list of infrastructure requirements, which will be compared to what is already available at the High Performance Computing facility, followed by what computing resources we suggest we should complement the Bioinformatics Resource Center. Suggested areas of investigations will be also explored in a subsequent sections, demonstrating the scope and diversity of the intended activities.
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