Bioinformatics

The Bioinformatics Division of the Department of Population Health Sciences (PHS) is the home for High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure, large data storage, bioinformatics expertise, and interdisciplinary research experience to manage and distribute complex genomic data sets, to develop and perform bioinformatics tasks and statistical analyses in the area of genomics and systems biology. The mission of the Bioinformatics Division is to provide bioinformatics education and to provide genomic research collaboration in analytic, quantitative, and computational area the entire UT Health San Antonio community, and especially in the area of high-throughput sequencing data analysis.

Who we are and what we do

The faculty and staff at Bioinformatics Division aim to establish as world-leading bioinformatics scientists in the application of new biomedical technologies and computational methods to the varieties of biomedical study. Our research area includes Systems biology and pan-cancer bioinformatics; Deep Learning methods in genomics, novel bioinformatics algorithm for NGS applications, and bioinformatics tools in proteo-genomics data analysis. By working with faculty from the Biostatistics Division, we will provide a wide range of research collaboration and education partners. The collaboration includes, but not limited to:

Data analysis and data quality control for next-generation sequencing, including gene expression profiles, whole-exome sequencing, and mutation analysis, Chromatin-Immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (ChIP-seq), and many NGS sequencing protocols;
Advanced genomic sequence-based bioinformatics tasks, such as CRISPR-cas9 whole-genome screening;
Research in NGS algorithm development, and new data analysis tools that will allow investigators to generate and/or validate new hypotheses based on the integration of genomic and clinical data;
Assistance to investigators with study planning, genomic-based experiment design, sample size, and power analysis;
Support for data resources (large data storage), high-performance computing infrastructure, software tools, and protocols that will enable the investigators in sharing and applying genomic data to basic and translational research. Support for clinical informatics resources, including database design and application development expertise; and
Other computational needs for basic/laboratory science, translational research, clinical-, and population-based research, including biomedical image analysis.
The Bioinformatics Division, directed by Dr. Yidong Chen, is an integral part of UT Health Cancer Center’s Next Generation Sequencing Shared Resource Operation and part of Greehey Children’s Cancer Center’s Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Initiative. The Bioinformatics Division opens new areas of research, enhances the quality and consistency in data analysis for next-generation sequencing, and provide bioinformatics education to graduate students and staff/faculty around UT Health San Antonio campus.