The MCCB Bioinformatics Core is a unique asset that provides bioinformatics and biostatistics support to researchers in the department. Comprising a team of accomplished computational biologists, led by Julie Zhu, PhD, the Bioinformatics Core works side-by-side with bench scientists to evaluate and implement the latest bioinformatics pipelines. The Bioinformatics group allows MCCB researchers to be uniquely positioned to take full advantage of standard and 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.

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

Finally, the Bioinformatics Core also provides assistance in experimental design (including prospective power and sample size analysis), statistical analysis and interpretation of the analysis results.