Bioinformatics Unit

Bioinformatics UnitBioinformatics Unit

Bioinformatics Unit

Head of Unit
Julia Ponomarenko

Bioinformatics Unit

Head of Unit
Julia Ponomarenko

Overview

The Bioinformatics Unit provides researchers at CRG and PRBB and external organizations with services of consultation, planning NGS and other genomic experiments, NGS data processing, analysis and management, software and database development, bioinformatics training, and access to high-performance computing resources at CRG.

The Unit works in synergy with the Genomics Unit and the Biomolecular Screening & Protein Technologies Unit (BMS-PT) to support users using high-throughput sequencing technologies from an experiment planning to delivery of timely and reliable results.

For more information please access the Unit website at http://biocore.crg.eu​ and/or take the virtual tour HERE.

Latest Updates

The Bioinformatics Unit gave the online ELIXIR course “Containers and Workflow Pipelines for reproducible and automated data analysis” (Oct 28, 2020)
The course was organized and supported by the VIB Bioinformatics core. 25 people attended the course. The course materials are available in GitHub and at this webpage.

The CRG Covid Viral Beacon relies on the SARS-CoV-2 genomic data processed by the Bioinformatics Unit using its MasterOfPore pipeline (Sep 8, 2020)
The EGA team has released the CRG Covid Viral Beacon,  a tool to find SARS-CoV-2 variability at genomic, amino acid and motif level. The Bioinformatics Unit adopted its MasterOfPore pipeline for the analysis of all publicly available cDNA Nanopore sequencing data used by the Beacon.

Two papers were published together with Harris Onywera, an intern in Bioinformatics Unit on the CRG-Novartis-Africa Mobility Programme (July 30, 2020)
Dr. Harris Onywera was an intern in the Unit for 6 months in 2016. Two collaborative papers were recently published in Frontiers in Medicine and BMC Microbiology. His experience at CRG has been recently featured in a U. Cape Town press-release

The Unit participated in the mass Covid-19 testing run by the CRG (June 23, 2020)
The ORFEU program was launched in April 2020 in response to the covid-19 outbreak. The Unit developed the web interface for scanning and registering the sample tubes and supported the flow of data on the samples and PCR results to the centralized database used by the hospitals. 

The website on uniformly analysed data of coronavirus and SARS-CoV-2 Nanopore direct RNA sequencing (Apr 10, 2020)
Data are provided at http://covid.crg.eu and are analyzed using the MasterOfPores pipeline developed by the Bioinformatics Unit in collaboration with the CRG group of Eva Novoa. The resource is listed by TransBioNet covid-19 research efforts and was highlighted in Medical Xpress and CETEM News.

The paper on MasterOfPores is published (March 17, 2020)
The paper describing MasterOfPores is published in Frontiers Genetics. MasterOfPores is a publicly available parallel and scalable workflow for the analysis of Oxford Nanopore direct RNA sequencing datasets. It has been developed and supported by the Bioinformatics Unit in collaboration with the CRG group of Eva Novoa.

The Unit members conducted the RNA-seq data analysis course at the Pasteur Institute, Tunis (Feb 13, 2020)
On 10-13 February, 2020, we organized and delivered the RNA-Seq data analysis course as part of the EU-funded collaborative PHINDaccess project. The course took place at the Institut Pasteur in Tunis.

Julia Ponomarenko CV

2002 PhD in Biology at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Novosibirsk, Russia.
2002 - 2004 Project Scientist, San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California San Diego, USA. 
2004 - 2008 Senior Research Scientist San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California San Diego, USA. 
2008 - 2015 Project Investigator (NIH/ NHGMS, NIAID), San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California San Diego, USA.
2015 - Head of the Bioinformatics Unit, Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona, Spain. ​