In this competitive renewal, the Bioinformatics & Biostatistics Core reasserts its commitment to providing thecomputational/bioinformatics infrastructure and analytical techniques necessary for the success of theUniversity of Washington NIDA Center. The unifying theme of the Center is to integrate results from globalgene expression and protein abundance profiles to provide a more detailed understanding of the molecularmechanisms involved in the host response to viral infection. By bringing together researchers with expertisein such varied fields as virology, bioinformatics, immunology, biostatistics, clinical medicine, and massspectrometry, our multidisciplinary approach to studying viral diseases such as AIDS and HCV allows forcommunication across these fields and integration of information to provide novel or improved methodstoward treatment of these diseases. While the other Cores are responsible for generating the collaborationsthat will lead to unique sets of biological samples and solving the problems surrounding newer technologiessuch as proteomics, the Bioinformatics & Biostatistics Core provides the necessary functions underpinningthe success of these efforts such as data management, computational infrastructure, statistical experimentaldesign and analysis, and data dissemination.
The Specific Aims of the Core are to: 1) Provide data analysissupport and platforms for the integration of disparate types of data. 2) Provide mechanisms for thedissemination of raw data and processed results to the research community. 3) Provide statistical expertiseand application training for optimized experimental design and data analysis. Our role often begins at theinception of a research program and continues long after the laboratory experiments have been completed.Biostatistics is key to our mission in terms of optimizing sample population, sample size, and samplingtechnique for the greatest efficiency and significance to be garnered from experiments as well as statisticalanalysis of the resulting data. Bioinformatics provides the computer infrastructure and databases for storageand dissemination of our results and is responsible for custom analysis, data integration, and softwaretraining. These wide-ranging efforts inextricably tie the Bioinformatics & Biostatistics Core to the overallsuccess of the other Cores with in the NIDA Center and underscore our importance in these research efforts.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 49 publications
