Bioinformatics Facility

The Wistar Institute
Room 214
3601 Spruce Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Facility Hours:  9:00 AM - 5:00 PM, Monday through Friday

Ramana Davuluri, Ph.D.
Scientific Director
215-495-6903

Zhiyan Fu
Facility Director
215-495-6903

Yanping Xiong 
Scientific Programmer/Systems Administrator
215-898-3769

Jayamanna Prynkara Wickramasinghe
Analyst
495-6837

Mihee Lee, Ph.D.
Statistician

Introduction

The mission of the Bioinformatics Facility is to support the continuing research and education mission of The Wistar Institute, as well as other shared facilities within the Cancer Center.

The Bioinformatics Facility provides Cancer Center investigators with database management, software applications support, and expertise in statistical analyses and computational modeling of biomedical research data.   Under the direction of Dr. Ramana Davuluri, Director of Computational Biology, the Bioinformatics Facility has recently grown to consist of faculty, programmers, and statistical specialists from the Center for Systems and Computational Biology.  The Facility is located in the newly renovated Center for Systems and Computational Biology (2,006 sq. ft.), which provides a state-of-the-art server room and expanded office and conference room space.

Functions of the Facility reflect the research requirements of the three Cancer Center programs and are broadly divided into three areas: (i) data-management; (ii) statistical analyses and computational modeling; and (iii) advanced bioinformatics tools for integrative cancer biology. Typical data analyses include large scale information datasets (omics data), generated by high-throughput technologies such as:

• genome sequencing (Illumina Genome Analyzer);
• gene regulation (ChIP-chip, ChIP-seq, epigenetic profiling);
• gene expression (e.g. mRNA and miRNA microarray expression data);
• proteomics (mass spectrometry-based spectra, LCMS, DIGE, etc.);
• polymorphism genotyping (e.g. Single Nucleotide [SNP] and Copy Number variations [CGH], LOH).

The Facility has placed a high priority on integrating cancer research information representing a variety of data types, including clinical patient data, molecular data from microarrays, massive-parallel sequencers (e.g. Illumina [Solexa] Genome Analyzer) and RT-PCR and image data from digitized microscopy slides.  Data security is a primary focus of the Bioinformatics Facility in designing and implementing software systems. The Facility also provides computational bioinformatics support to assist in the analysis of genomic, molecular, and proteomic data using commercial and locally-developed software packages.