ServicesBlocks

OVERVIEW

The CRG Bioinformatics Core facility provides researchers at CRG-CNAG/PRBB and external organizations, both academic and commercial, with services of consultation, planning NGS and other genomic experiments, NGS data processing, analysis and management, software and database development, bioinformatics training, and access to high-performance computing resources at CRG.

The CRG Bioinformatics Core facility provides researchers at CRG-CNAG/PRBB and external organizations, both academic and commercial, with services of consultation, planning NGS and other genomic experiments, NGS data processing, analysis and management, software and database development, bioinformatics training, and access to high-performance computing resources at CRG. BioCore works in synergy with the other CRG core facilities, including Genomics Unit and Biomolecular Screening & Protein Technologies Unit, to support researchers throughout all steps of high-throughput experiments, from an experiment planning to delivery of timely and reliable results.

In addition to services provided for fee, we support fully collaborative grant-funded investigations. This includes preliminary data analysis, planning the grant budget and experiments provided by the CRG Genomics Unit, writing relevant sections of the proposal, data analysis and biological inference, custom software development, and co-authored dissemination of the grant results.

PROCEDURE

To request a service, a free consultation, or to propose a collaborative project or a grant proposal, please contact the BioCore Head at Julia.Ponomarenko@crg.eu.

We encourage researchers to discuss both experimental and bioinformatics procedures before submitting materials for sequencing at the CRG Genomics Unit.

After an agreement on the provided services and deliverables is reached after initial meeting, before starting actual work, we issue an official quotation, which has to be approved by the user in writing (via e-mail). By agreeing with the quotation, the user enters into the contract with CRG and agrees with our Terms and Conditions of the service.

Our turnaround time for completing the service is 3-10 business days, depending on the request’s complexity and the current capacity. For standard requests (those below for which the cost estimate is provided), we can usually provide an accurate estimate of delivery time.

Throughout the project, we carefully document our work and constantly communicate with the researchers on the progress and revise initial goals if needed.

When the request is completed, we issue an invoice on actual accounted hours (please refer to the page FEES below). We can also provide the final written report, facilitate preparation of relevant sections of publications, and handle submission of data to public repositories.

For specifics on methods and deliverables, please contact us at BioinformaticsUnit@crg.eu.

FEES

All our communication with users, including consultations, meetings, quotations, and e-mail/skype communication, is free of charge.

Please refer to this webpage for our current fees for manual (Data Analysis, Database Maintenance Support, Programming / Database Development) and computing hours (Automatic Data Analysis) for CRG/PRBB and other public organizations. Prices for commercial users are subject of negotiation.

The storage of original and derived data at CRG, which is guaranteed for 6 months after completion of the request, is free of charge.

Basic services

• Consultation on bioinformatics methods and resources
• Software evaluation, implementation, and training
• Customization of bioinformatics resources
• Training on different bioinformatics topics

Data analysis

• High-throughput data analysis of genomics, transcriptomics, epigenetics and proteomics datasets
• Next-Gen data analysis. The unit has invested time and effort in establishing several pipelines dedicated to the analysis of Deep-sequencing data. Currently, the unit has experience analyzing different types of deep-sequencing data:

Functional Elements Identification

• Automatic gene annotation (including non-coding genes)
• Functional annotation of protein coding genes
• Regulatory sequences: DNA motif analysis (novel and known)

Software and Data Management

• Database design and development
• Web interface development
• Development of versatile ticketing and project management systems based on wiki technologies
• Implementation of integrative bioinformatics web applications
• Implementation of customized Genome browsers