The Columbia Genome Center (CGC) has entered into a collaboration with AMDeC to provide a Bioinformatics Core Facility. This facility is designed to provide advanced computational capabilities in Bioinformatics to AMDeC member institutions (which are academic and medical research institutions located in New York State). The purpose is to enhance the competitiveness of New York State in biomedical research.

The initial focus of the Facility is to be an easy-to-use platform for advanced sequence analysis. We make available high-speed, specialized hardware and sophisticated commercial and academic software. To make these useful, we maintain the latest copies of all major sequence databases. Investigators can use these components to perform one-time projects or to build up their own ongoing analysis pipeline. We are provide a scientific and technical staff which can assist with or collaborate on individual projects. As part of the Bioinformatics Group of the CGC, we also have access to the advice and expertise of associated CGC faculty and staff members.

The accelerated hardware platforms available here are especially well suited to supporting large scale projects, such as BLAST jobs involving thousands of queries, or genome scale gene searches using sensitive algorithms such as HMMer and Genewise.