Bioinformatics Translational Technology Platform

We offer collaborative support for researchers at the UCL Cancer Institute and within the CRUK UCL Centre.

The facility is hosted at the Bill Lyons Informatics Centre (BLIC). This sixth-floor extension to the UCL Cancer Institute was built in November 2013 and named to recognise support from the Lyons Charitable Trust.

The Centre provides a base for up to 12 bioinformaticians and computational biologists.

Resources

The Bioinformatics Translational Technology Platform is currently run by three full-time staff members: the Head of Centre and two postdoctoral fellows.

The Bill Lyons Informatics Centre also hosts other researchers including PhD students and postdoctoral fellows from collaborating groups.

To ensure the efficient processing and handling of large data sets, we make full use of the UCL-funded IT facilities, including the Myriad cluster and the UCL Research Data Storage services, as well as the Computer Science HPC cluster.

Services

The Bioinformatics Translational Technology Platform supports the UCL Cancer Institute researchers at different levels; from basic bioinformatics services to full-scale scientific collaborations. A non-exhaustive list of our contributions include:

• Assistance with study design and project planning
• Data processing, QC, statistical data analysis and biological interpretation of results
• Development and maintenance of automated data analysis pipelines
• Development of novel tools and custom methods for specific analyses
• Assistance with the preparation of manuscripts and grant proposals.

You will find other examples of our work in our public GitHub repository. For instance, we have developed a tool in collaboration with the Cancer Genomics Engineering (CAGE) Facility for the analysis of CRISPR resequencing experiments (crispr-parsr) and an automated pipeline for the analysis of cytometry data (cytofpipe). We also maintain some software and reference databases on the UCL Myriad compute cluster.

Team members