Virtual Bioinformatics Core
Access the right amount of support for all your bioinformatics needs.
The Virtual Bioinformatics Core is our standard service for academic researchers and companies with continuous or recurrent bioinformatics needs.
The service guarantees you access to dedicated full time equivalents (FTEs) from our team of PhD-level bioinformaticians for as long as you like.
This service has been developed based on our experience of providing bioinformatics support for researchers in over 150 academic and private organizations since 2011.
How does it work?
We allocate you an agreed amount of FTEs, from 0.25 to multiple FTEs. You will have
- A virtual core manager who helps you prioritize and schedule projects and allocates individual projects to our bioinformaticians to work on
- One or more project managers responsible for the analysis, scientific communication and reporting
- Additional support from our team of 10+ experienced bioinformaticians
What does the service include?
- Data analysis: The project manager will design analysis workflows based on your needs, and apply ready-made pipelines or build tailored pipelines using publicly available standard analysis tools. The workflows are primarily based on bash/R/Python languages, and can be made available for your team’s usage or publication purposes.
- Computation: The computation takes place on our secure high-performance computing cluster at no extra cost. Purpose-built from industry-grade servers, the cluster is optimized for heavy genomic computing and has a very wide range of analysis tools pre-installed.
- Communication: Efficient communication is our top priority. The project manager will organize regular video calls with your team to present and explain the latest results and plan the next analysis steps. In between the calls, you can reach your project manager via email with questions or analysis requests.
- Scientific writing: At the end of an analysis project we can provide a publication-style report with all the key results and method descriptions with appropriate citations. Alternatively, if you have a manuscript in preparation, we can add the method descriptions and other bioinformatics-specific information directly into it.
- Publication support: If you aim to publish the findings in a scientific journal, the project manager will help you with publishing-related tasks such as polishing figures and tables according to journal guidelines, reviewing and editing the manuscript, submitting data and analysis code to public repositories, and addressing reviewer questions.
- Code delivery & training: We can also transfer bioinformatics know-how back to your group. The project manager can share analysis scripts with your team members and provide instructions on their usage. Please note that some background knowledge in programming may be required to successfully reapply analysis scripts / pipelines on new datasets.
- Consulting: We can help you design your future projects from the bioinformatics perspective. Sequencing methods, technical parameters (e.g. numbers of replicates, sequencing depth), required analysis methods, and budgeting are our primary expertise, and we can help you put these in a grant application, for instance.
