About The Bioinformatics Core

MCCB’s in-house Bioinformatics Core is a unique asset that provides cutting-edge, high-level bioinformatics and biostatistics support to researchers in the department. The Core comprises a team of accomplished computational biologists led by Julie Zhu, PhD, who serves as the Head of the Bioinformatics Core.

The team works side-by-side with bench scientists to:

• Implement the latest bioinformatics pipelines, allowing researchers to take full advantage of cutting-edge sequencing technologies including ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, TAB-seq, NAD-seq, PAS-seq, RNA-seq, CUT&RUN, genome-wide CRISPR or shRNA screening, GUIDE-seq, exon sequencing, small RNA sequencing, scRNA-seq, scATAC-seq and iCLIP.
• Provide assistance in experimental design (including prospective power and sample size analysis), statistical analysis and interpretation of the analysis results.
• Develop novel algorithms and software pipelines.

In addition, the Bioinformatics group is an active contributor to the open-source open-development Bioconductor project, and has developed more than a dozen software packages with various utilities, ranging from machine learning, quality assessment, peak calling, annotation, motif analysis and visualization, to gRNA design and evaluation.