Enabling world-changing research initiatives

Our staff members can serve as co-PI in funded research projects. With our double expertise in computational and biological matters, we can contribute in projects that involve programing, database management, web design, genetic data analysis, and interpretation.

Food security

The facility has been supporting the goals of the NSF-funded Panzea project for over ten years by building a data management system and creating infrastructure for data storage. The project has been instrumental to understand maize genetic diversity and domestication; identify and map of key genes; develop methods and algorithms transferable to the study of other organisms; and train of over 100 distinguished scientists in crop genetics and breeding.

Resistance to cold and diseases

As part of the VitisGen program, the facility developed computational pipelines to track samples and genetic information of grape cultivars. This helps breeders save time, effort and cost to develop varieties with better taste, resistant to fungal infections, and adapted to low temperatures.

Genomic Open-source Breeding Informatics Initiative (GOBII)

The facility provides computational infrastructure and analysis capabilities for the GOBII project, an unprecedented initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to organize genomic data for common crops. GOBII provides open access to data, allowing developing countries to use modern genomic tools to breed new varieties cheaper, faster and more efficiently.

Food-borne pathogens

In collaboration with the Cornell Food Safety laboratory, the facility has developed an open web-based data exchange platform to store genetic and phenotypic information about foodborne micro-organisms. The two groups also jointly developed an educational game that used in several college food safety curricula to train the next generation of food scientists.