Our Mission
Advances in sequencing length and quality, as well as decrease of sequencing cost render high-throughput sequencing technology a common task in biomedical research. In contrast to traditional low-throughput method, high-throughput sequencing provides comprehensive genetic information of a biological system. However, data processing and data analysis heavily rely on modern high-performance computer clusters, bioinformatics and sophisticated statistics, which are not regular tasks of bench-oriented laboratories and researchers. Data storage, data transfer and data sharing also require specialized techniques. 3402 Bioinformatics Group was set up as a platform to bridge the knowledge and resources gap between “wet” lab and “dry” lab to facilitate adaptation of high-throughput methods to modern research. Our group provides full service regarding pre-experiment design, post-experiment data analysis and data interpretation assistance. For details of our service, please see “Service” page.
About Us
3402 Bioinformatics Group is named after the street name of my home in Columbia, Missouri, USA. The group was started in 2013, in the dinning room of 3402 after a whole night of thoughtful and enthusiastic conversion about biomedical research, computer science and data science. The group has involved in several research projects on MU campus where the group members were doing our PhDs. Some of the projects finally led to research publications (and of course some of them failed) and presented in international conferences. Now the group expands and it is time for us to expand the service from the campus we stayed to the whole scientific research community. We hope this website can link 3402 Bioinformatics Group to any laboratory who wants to implement high throughput sequencing to daily research. Our research interests cover cancer research, personalized medicine, genetics, bioinformatics, bioengineering and high performance computing. What makes us unique is we have background in each of the above area and we know the “language” in each of these fields.
About Future
In term of technic, we currently use local computer cluster to process regular tasks like transcriptome de novo assembly, genotyping, gene expression profiling and etc.. But we don’t want to get attached to any hardware we need to regularly perform maintenance, therefore we are in the process of moving all the computation workload and data storage to Amazon Web Service.
In term of social service, we plan to facilitate the application of personalized medicine by providing bioinformatics services to decipher patients’ genomic information. Increasing amount of reports showed genetic variance and irregular gene expression can place a patient into a cohort that show therapeutic effect from off-label usage of certain medication. At current stage, we are seeking funding from government, corporation or private sectors to perform genome sequencing for patients in need. In parallel, we are also collaborating with clinical oriented laboratories to generalize clinical discoveries from personalized medicine to cohorts of patients that share genetic variances or gene expression pattern using public available clinical genetic data, to temporarily decrease the cost of personalized medicine.