Project Director: Gregory Buck, Ph.D.

With the recent completion of sequence analysis of the genomes of humans, fruit flies, flatworms, and various bacteria and other microbes, and the promise of continued even more rapid acquisition of sequence data, GenBank and other sequence databases continue to expand exponentially. In particular, gene expression databases derived from spotted array technology or Affymetrix GeneChip™ analyses are extremely large, complex and cumbersome.

Bioinformatics applications are rapidly being implemented to handle and decipher this growing mass of information. However, exchange of this data among participating investigators requires significant bandwidth. Through the Nucleic Acids Research Facilities and the developing Center for the Study of Biological Complexity, VCU has established several collaborative research projects requiring the exchange of large data sets with other public and private institutions. For example, one microbial genome-sequencing project requires the exchange of tens of thousands of DNA sequence files each of which is 150-200 kbytes in size. In another project, the Virginia Bioinformatics Consortium (VBC), one of several collaborative projects involves the generation and exchange of massive data sets derived from gene expression analyses performed on spotted arrays.

A second demonstration project in the VBC invokes distance learning technologies to team teach bioinformatics classes in collaboration with participating universities.
A third project, the Cancer Genome Initiative, involves generation of multiple gene expression array analyses from hundreds to thousands of cancer patients at several sites across the Commonwealth of Virginia. Each of these projects will take advantage of Internet 2 capabilities for the transfer and exchange of these large data sets. Partner institutions include Tufts University, the University of Minnesota, George Mason University, the University of Virginia, Virginia Polytechnical and State University, and the Inova Hospital system.