Why (and how much) we charge for bioinformatics support

By Simon Cockell On April 23, 2013 · 5 Comments

The Bioinformatics Support Unit has been operating for over eight years now, and for all of that time we’ve run under a ‘cost recovery’ model. The faculty understands that in order to be a cutting-edge medical school (that’s research-led) we need certain essential services. In return, we understand that the faculty cannot just write off [...]

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Increasing hardware capacity

By Simon Cockell On February 26, 2013 · Add Comment

The BSU last made a serious investment in hardware around 4 years ago. At that time, the sequencing revolution was starting to gather momentum. Illumina had just launched the GAIIx, promising to deliver a massive 50Gb per run. Mammoth, the machine we bought at the time, was purchased with this in mind. We had RAM [...]

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Contributing to the OpenAshDieBack crowd sourced effort

By Matthew Bashton On February 12, 2013 · 1 Comment

Just before finishing for Christmas last year I became interested in the crowd sourced effort to analyse the fungal disease currently affecting ash trees. The disease is caused by the Chalara fraxinea fungus. The data for the project was quickly released following initial sequencing runs via GitHub. This is similar to an approach taken with [...]

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The top n reasons social media is good for science

By Simon Cockell On February 4, 2013 · 1 Comment

I’m leading a digital literacy event this afternoon for the BBSRC Doctoral Training Program PhD students from Newcastle, Durham and Liverpool Universities. The aim of the session is to provide examples and experiences of how effective use of social media can improve your output and your impact in science. For the record, I do believe [...]

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Announcing BIOINF-SIG

By Simon Cockell On May 23, 2012 · Add Comment

Back in February a working group proposed by Faculty Dean of Research, Michael Whitaker, met for the first time. The aim of this working group is to discuss matters relating to data management and bioinformatics that arise across the faculty. Among other ideas put forward at the meeting, Michael recommended the establishment of a Bioinformatics Interest Group, [...]

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The first BSU training workshop

By Simon Cockell On March 28, 2012 · 1 Comment

Last week we ran our first training workshop for the faculty’s researchers. Over 2 days, we took them on a whistle stop tour of popular bioinformatics tools and databases, including, but not limited to: BLAST PSI-BLAST Jalview Reactome The Gene Ontology Gene Expression Omnibus GeneSpring GX Ingenuity Pathway Analysis The full program is available [...]

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