The Molecular Biology Computing Service is headed by a trained bioinformaticist to provide assistance to investigators in their microarray analyses and to develop custom software solutions to analyze DNA sequencing, CGH, and other genome-wide interrogation applications. The DNA Facility maintains a variety of commercial personal computer software packages used for nucleic acid and protein sequence analysis including: Vector NTI (Invitrogen), Primer Express (Applied Biosystems), and Oligo (Molecular Biology Insights). The types of analyses include, but are not limited to sequence retrievals, restriction enzyme analysis, sequence alignments, PCR and DNA sequencing primer design, and secondary structure analysis. The facility personnel are available to perform, instruct, or assist in the use of the sequence analysis programs.

The DNA Facility also maintains licenses for a number of commercial microarray analysis software packages including ArrayAssist (Stratagene), Partek Genomics Suite (Partek), and Ingenuity Pathways Analysis (Ingenuity Systems).

The DNA Facility provides several types of support for bioinformatics:

Purchase of software licenses that would ordinarily be prohibitively expensive for single labs/PIs to purchase

Consultation/training services to enable investigators to proceed with their own analysis

Bioinformatics services on a fee for service or percentage effort on a grant. This can include analysis, custom software, database or webpage design