The Morris Cotton Cancer Center (NCCC) Bioinformatics Shared Resource (BISR) has operated as a core facility since 2002. The BISR was developed within the NCCC as a resource to meet the bioinformatics needs of the NCCC but has expanded to provide services to the entire Dartmouth research community. Bioinformatics plays a central role in modern cancer research through the storage, management, retrieval, and computational analysis of biomedical data. However, the successful application of bioinformatics requires a combination of advanced computing infrastructure and a highly trained technical staff with expertise in computer programming, databases, and software engineering. Combining the specialized staff and infrastructure into a central core facility provides the cancer researcher access to critical bioinformatics services and intellectual support. The economy of scale of a centralized core facility for bioinformatics support yields tremendous cost-savings and more efficient data analysis for the individual investigator who may not have the resources or expertise to provide computational support in their own lab. The BISR has been significantly strengthened and expanded over the past three years with new leadership, new personnel, and new computing infrastructure to provide state-of-the-art bioinformatics support, including computer programming, database design and development, data-mining, high-performance computing, and software engineering. This core collaborates very closely with the Biostatistics, Genomics, Molecular Biology, and Proteomics Shared Services as a component of the Integrative Biology Group to provide coordinated support for the investigator applying these expertise and tools for genomic-level analyses. We have successfully established an effective mechanism to provide the latest bioinformatics applications for all high-throughput datasets from the NCCC community, and the overall goal of this core facility is to continue to provide NCCC researchers with state-of-the-art technical support and services for their cancer research, at as low a rate as possible, so that they can continue to meet their research objectives in whatever direction their hypotheses and results may lead.
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