BIC consists of cross-disciplinary engineers who are highly skilled in almost all aspects of IT and yet have enough knowledge in the areas of biology to make their presence indispensable. Their mission is to design, implement and maintain the core life science/IT infrastructure that supports research that is done in the field of bioinformatics.
From fixing the smallest problems in Microsoft Windows to writing complex programs to help researchers manipulate the largest databases or analyse and fix networking problems, the team lends their talents to almost anything that is within their capability.
Most important is the team's tireless effort in helping to propagate bioinformatics resources. The team participates actively as technical consultants in the Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet) as well as in other Asia-Pacific Networking Group (APNG) supported organisations and has recently begun assisting several groups to set up bioinformatics resources and provide individual assistance.
Some of these groups include:
NUS Department of Biological Sciences Bioinformatics Node
NUS Bioprocessing Technology Centre Bioinformatics Node
The National Cancer Centre Bioinformatics Node
The team also assists serveral of scientists on their
projects as well as maintain links to many well known external
resources like the Protein Databank (PDB) mirrored directly from the
Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB).
Their involment in APBioNet has resulted in active participation of the
BioMirrors project, This project provides users with high speed access to
these large databases some of which exceed 10 Gigabytes. The project sites
are connected with the Internet II infrastructure of vBNS
and the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN). Good planning, team
cohesiveness and hard work has resulted in a cheap, highly scalable system
to house the ever growing data sets with little maintainence.
With the creation of the S-Star Alliance in bioinformatics education, the team
has also taken up the added responsibility of providing technical resourses
and consultancy for this prestegious collaboration between some of the top
univesities in the world.
The links on the right, under Resource Categories, will pop up lists of all the resources both commercial, external and
in-house that are available from the center. Update listings and descriptions will
help you find the right application you require.
The unit is also starting to test several GRID enabled bio/life science applications on the Tera Campus Grid (TCG) (United Devices GRID-BLAST was a tremendous success) and will be adding them soon.
Also feel free to download (when available) our BIC Resource Handbook,
which will give you information on what resources are available, how to use them, what kind of regulation
apply to the use of applications, the different groups of specialists (PERL programmers, database administrators, etc) who may be able
to assist you in any particular area of need and much more.