Bioinformatics and Analysis Core
Silbiu-Alin J. Bacanu, Brien P. Riley, B. Todd Webb and Mikhail G. Dozmorov
The Bioinformatics and Analysis (BIA) Core serves as a support network for all VCU Alcohol Research Center (ARC) projects and will interact closely with each component to provide computational, statistical, and research design expertise. The core will play a central role in the data collection, curation, annotation, management, storage, and analysis. As such, we will first collect and curate project related data include those generated by the VCU-ARC and those that are available from other outside sources. Examples of these internal and external data include human association studies and expression and network analyses for mouse, worm and fly. The collected data will be integrated via a data management system. Many statistical and bioinformatics analyses will be performed for the identification of Alcohol Use Disorders (AUD) related genes, including within and across species gene network analysis. The core will also implement methods for prioritizing genes for additional study. The overall goal of facilitating data sharing and the application of emerging methods will be to accelerate the understanding of AUD and related traits. To this end, a wide range of experimental data and results related to alcohol will be used and generated by the proposed center. Collecting and integrating these data provides the opportunity to discover patterns that would be detected when considering a single organism or experimental design.