Bioinformatics and Scientific Programming Core Facility
- Ryan Dale, PhD, Scientific Information Officer, Head, Bioinformatics and Scientific Programming Core
- Caroline Esnault, PhD, Staff Scientist
- Apratim Mitra, PhD, Staff Scientist
- Hongen (Henry) Zhang, PhD, Staff Scientist
- Gennady Margolin, PhD, Bioinformatics Scientist
- Mira Sohn, PhD, Bioinformatics Scientist
- Kiersten Campbell, BS, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
- Gus Fridell, BS, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
- Tyler Menold, BS, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
- Ally Questell, BE, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
- Lilly Shatford-Adams, BS, Postbaccalaureate Fellow
- Alicia Evans, Research Software Engineer
The goal of the Bioinformatics and Scientific Programming Core (BSPC) is to provide expert bioinformatics support to NICHD researchers, assisting at all stages, from experimental design through several iterations of analysis to final manuscript preparation. In addition, we develop software tools that can be applied to a wide range of bioinformatics, genomics, and general data analysis, both at the NICHD and in the larger international scientific community. We also coordinate training for staff and trainees in basic programming and genomic analyses to help build bioinformatics support directly within labs.
Structure
The BSPC uses a “hub and spoke” model, consisting of a central core of staff in Building 6A coordinating with embedded bioinformaticians (currently Buildings 6, 49, and 35), who work directly with a subset of laboratories. This allows us to build a centralized infrastructure that can be re-used across many research programs, while at the same time maintaining focused and custom local support in labs. Joint meetings and discussion allow everyone, central and embedded, to share lessons learned and identify new tools and methods. We work closely with NICHD's Molecular Genomics Core, sharing sequencing data storage and infrastructure to streamline the process for our collaborators, and we host weekly meetings that are open to the entire Institute to explore and discuss trending bioinformatics topics.
Projects Overview
In 2023, the BSPC worked on 88 projects, collaborating with principal investigators (PIs), fellows, staff scientists, and staff clinicians across 35 laboratories. Of these, 31 were new projects and 57 were carried over from the previous year. The projects included assays such as bulk RNA-seq, single-cell RNA-seq, spatially-resolved RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, whole-exome sequencing, whole-genome sequencing, DNA methylation, CUT& RUN, bulk ATAC-seq, and single-cell ATAC-seq, TRIP (Thousands of Reporters in Parallel) data, and long-read assembly. Some projects involved custom algorithm development and tool development, and many projects required integration with published studies.
Projects often begin with an in-depth discussion with researchers to understand the background and goals of the project. It is important for us to understand the underlying biology and details of the experimental design (when applicable) for each project, so that we can make the most informed analysis decisions. We then provide a prioritized plan for the first round of analysis and schedule the work. There are often several iterations of analysis as a project progresses. Each iteration may add more sophisticated analyses, new data generated by the lab, or integrate results with published data. As expected for a no-cost shared resource, the time it takes for one iteration on one project is highly dependent on the existing workload across all other projects that we are handling in the Institute.
After each iteration, we meet to discuss the results in detail. The meeting includes a walk-through of the results, the computational background, discussion of how to use and interpret the tables, figures, and other output, and recommendations for next steps. Depending on the researcher’s interests, this can also include a discussion of the code and help with running it or adapting it to other projects in the lab. The next iteration of analysis is then planned, prioritized, and scheduled.
The BSPC’s collaboration includes writing the manuscript, producing figures and tables, consulting on interpretation, writing detailed computational methods, reviewing code, and submitting code to public repositories along with the complete software environments required to make the analyses reproducible.
Projects: Computation and code
Most projects are multi-week or multi-month projects, which continue after many iterations and often require authoring substantial amounts of custom R and Python code. We work closely with NICHD's Molecular Genomics Core, where much of the raw high-throughput sequencing data for NICHD are generated. We can access these data directly, avoiding the need to coordinate data transfer and/or storage space with researchers. Analysis performed by the BSPC makes extensive use of NIH’s Biowulf high-performance computing cluster, and there is no direct cost to researchers for work done by the BSPC.
To ensure long-term computational reproducibility, we build a complete software environment for each project, which allows us to track all versions of software and dependencies, and any one project’s environment can be updated without affecting any others. All source code is kept under version control so that the entire history of the project can be tracked. We also build reproducible workflows for each project that keep track of which results have been updated and, wherever possible, provide output as standalone, interactive HTML files, so that researchers can easily explore their results.
We also maintain R Shiny applications into which we load analysis results. Carnation allows our collaborators to explore their bulk RNA-seq, and cascade allows them to explore single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) and spatially-resolved RNA-seq so they can dig deeper without requiring additional computational resources or bioinformatics skills. These applications are continuously updated based on feedback from our collaborators to ensure that they remain easy to use and helpful. New this year is converting cascade to use an underlying high-performance data structure called AnnData, which helps scale to scRNA-seq experiments with hundreds of thousands of cells.
Additional software development and computational resources
The BSPC continues to develop and maintain publicly available open-source tools. One example is lcdb-wf, a system of workflows and pipelines to process high-throughput sequencing data, run extensive quality control, and perform differential ChIP-seq or RNA-seq analyses and which run on NIH’s Biowulf computing cluster. We also continue to contribute to the Bioconda project, a system used by bioinformaticians worldwide to easily install biology-related software tools.
The BSPC maintains an Posit Connect Server instance, which allows us to publish interactive applications that researchers can use to interactively explore and plot their data. We also maintain a GitLab instance in NICHD’s data center, which provides source-code version control, issue tracking, and documentation for projects we work on in such a way that they can be shared with collaborators. These repositories currently store tens of thousands of lines of Python and R code as well as documentation written by the BSPC and used in various projects.
Contact
For more information, visit https://www.nichd.nih.gov/about/org/dir/other-facilities/cores/bioinformatics.
