UNC-CH Information Technology Services

Web portal provides access to bioinformatics applications and training

The NC Bioportal Project recently launched the NC Bioportal, a new bioinformatics portal that serves as a training resource and a tool for scientific studies for North Carolina researchers.

The portal, which supports more than 100 computational tools and biological data sets in a standards compliant environment, is intended for use by the state’s educational and research community. It was developed in part with seed funding from the University of North Carolina Office of the President for development of advanced research and education applications in high-performance computing, information systems, and computational and computer science.

“North Carolina prides itself on its globally recognized scientific community whose developments and research play such a vital role in the state economy,” said Robin Render, vice president for information resources and chief information officer for the UNC Office of the President. “The NC Bioportal is a keystone enabler of collaboration spanning the entire state that provides new capability in the fields of biotechnology, bioinformatics, and genomics.”

The NC Bioportal was developed by the NC Bioportal Team, composed of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), UNC-Chapel Hill’s Information Technology Services (ITS), the UNC-Chapel Hill Center for Bioinformatics and the High Performance Computing Department at Wake Technical Community College. During the past year, Dr. Dan Reed, RENCI director and UNC-Chapel Hill vice-chancellor for information technology, led the team in combining and extending the best of open source solutions for the development and deployment of an extensible bioinformatics portal based on the Open Grid Computing Environment (OGCE) portal toolkit.

“If North Carolina is to compete effectively, both in the United States and in a global market, it must leverage all of its human, intellectual and economic assets,” explained Reed. “The NC Bioportal is a cornerstone of future infrastructure, research and educational models required to foster collaboration and interaction across research and teaching institutions, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and state entities.”

The portal capability is hosted at UNC-Chapel Hill for statewide use. In addition, the open source toolkit developed by the project will soon be available for deployment by other research and educational institutions across the state. In the coming months, the bioportal team will be conducting a series of training workshops across North Carolina.

“The NC Bioportal is a launch pad for bioinformatics research and education projects across the state, said Reed. “The knowledge gained from use of the portal training tools, coupled with the data made possible from use of the applications available on the portal, will enhance North Carolina’s international competitiveness in biotechnology and bioinformatics.”

For More Information, visit the NC Bioportal at http://www.ncbioportal.org.

Contacts:

Renaissance Computing Institute (RECNI) (www.renci.org):
Dan Reed, (919) 966-1585, dan_reed@unc.edu

ITS Research Computing:
Ruth Marinshaw, (919) 962-4314, ruth_marinshaw@unc.edu

UNC-Chapel Hill Center for Bioinformatics:
Hemant Kelkar, (919) 843-5933, hkelkar@unc.edu

Wake Technical Community College High Performance Computing Department:
Sylvia W. Harrison, (919) 661-3209, swharris@waketech.edu