The Institute purchases, installs, supports, and gives tutorials on popular software for biological research. This includes but not limited to software for genomics and microarray (BLAST, GCG, DNAStar, Expressionist, GeneSpring, Spotfire), proteomics (Mascot, Sequest, Peaks), structure determination and simulation (Explorer, InsightII, Charmm, NAMD), statistics (SAS, R, SPLUS), and bioimage analysis (Amira, Huygens, Volocity).

In addition to software support, MSI hosts and supports databases using standard software like Oracle and MySQL. The Institute serves as the central data distribution hubs for DNA sequencing, microarray, and proteomics data in cooperation with the Biomedical Genomics Center and the Center for Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics.

The Institute also provides support in the area of application development. Currently there are development projects active that are relevant to many areas of biological sciences. The applications group is developing reusable tools for workflows and is also developing new tools to help share data between research groups, departments, and the Mayo Clinic. Both of these projects are funded by Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics.

Please contact the Institute's user support staff to discuss your needs, projects, databases, and software requirements. For more information, please check the Institute's computational biology website at http://www.msi.umn.edu/user_support/compgen/

The University of Minnesota in collaboration with other leading biotechnology and health science institutions in SE Minnesota is establishing a center for biomedical informatics and quantitative and computational studies in the life sciences in Rochester. The research focus of this center will be quantitative biomedical research. The academic focus of the center will initially be on a graduate program in computational biology and biomedical informatics in life and health sciences. University of Minnesota Rochester will provide administrative and infrastructure support.

The graduate program is being developed at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities with tracks to provide specialized training in multidisciplinary aspects of biological research at the interface of the biological, physical, and engineering sciences. Graduate students who participate in research projects of the center would receive their degrees through this graduate program. The graduate program will be established in two stages.

Stage 1

• In Fall 2007 admit a cohort of up to ten graduate students on two-year traineeships to currently existing graduate programs with the goal of completing their M.S. degree (Plan A) within two years. Students will be in residence in either in Rochester or the Twin Cities.
• Advisors will be from the graduate program the student was admitted to with a co-advisor from one of the participating institutions.
• The cohort will take 2-4 common courses. The courses will be selected from currently existing courses in Spring 2007. Courses will be co-taught and delivered in both the Twin Cities and Rochester.
• Weekly conference calls/meetings will be held to promote interaction between the students and advisors. A joint symposium will be held twice a semester to bring all participants together.

• During Spring 2007, a committee of faculty from the University of Minnesota and the participating institutions will be formed to develop a proposal for a new M.S. and Ph.D. graduate program in biomedical informatics and computational biology in health and life sciences along with selected topics in business and technology management. Target date for establishing the new program is Fall 2008.
• The proposal will include 1) the identification of currently existing courses and the courses that need to be developed and 2) course delivery methods that address issues related to effective course delivery in two locations (Twin Cities and Rochester), and 3) resources needed to successfully run the program.

The research center and graduate program will provide trained professionals in an area of critical need for the state and will be a catalyst for establishing long-term collaborations among researchers from the University of Minnesota and the participating institutions. To initially recruit top graduate students, UMR will provide 2-year traineeships for up to ten graduate students in Fall 2007, and ten 2-year traineeships per year for either M.S. or Ph.D. students in Fall 2008, 2009, and 2010.

For more information, contact Dick Westerlund at .

The Bioinformatics Group is a unit of the University of Minnesota Cancer Center (UMCC) Informatics Core. In its mission to further research, the Bioinformatics Group provides support and guidance to cancer researchers that incorporate bioinformatics tools and methods in their projects.

One of the bioinformatics group's unique strength is its staff's ability to bridge across the fields of biological/biomedical research and bioinformatics. Staff members provide expert advice and analysis of DNA-based microarray gene expression analysis, promoter analysis, sequence processing, sequence annotation, SNP analysis, data integration and modeling. In this support context, new applications are being developed or brought in house for evaluation.

Information technologies permeate modern biomedical research, and current trends toward large-volume data production in measurement technologies, information reuse by broader research communities, and networked research collaborations indicate their application will continue to grow. Researchers increasing are finding it beneficial to consider formal data management practices for their projects, to adopt metadata standards such as ontologies, and to take advantage of sophisticated software systems for data processing, exploration, analysis, and mining.

The Center for Biomedical Research Informatics was created April 2006 with the mission to provide a comprehensive research informatics facility serving basic and clinical researchers in the University of Minnesota's Academic Health Center. Specifically, our goal has been to help investigators benefit directly from informatics technologies and practices. We provide three services areas: software development services, data analysis services, and computing services through the Research Informatics Computing Center.

As a shared facility within the Academic Health Center, we participate in the AHC's Informatics Advisory Group to coordinate, plan, and develop the informatics resources available to basic and clinical research groups. We work with the Cancer Center's Bioinformatics Core and with the MSI Computational Genetics Laboratory to help ensure biomedical researchers a rich set of resources.