Bielefeld-Gießen Center for Microbial Bioinformatics (BiGi)

The Bielefeld-Gießen (BiGi) Bioinformatics Resource Center combines bioinformatics expertise and facilities at Bielefeld University and Justus-Liebig-University Gießen providing bioinformatics support, compute resources and software tools for the field of microbial genome research. Researchers at both sites can look back on many years of experience in the areas of microbial genome, metagenome, and postgenome research. In 2016, the center was extended by the partner project MetaProtServ at the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg complementing the microbial genome analysis portfolio for metaproteome data analysis.

Bioinformatics services for the life science community

The resource center offers bioinformatics services and user training for biologists as well as for bioinformaticians. Particular emphasis is being placed on first level user support and the provision of customized services for different levels of user competence.

Users that require support in the analysis of microbial data is offered access to ready-to-use bioinformatics software solutions and guidance on applicable analysis methods. Users with a background in shell programming or scripting is provided a wide range of state-of-the-art bioinformatics tools including up-to-date data resources, e.g. for BLAST searches. Software developers that require compute and storage resources for advanced data analyses or the development and evaluation of novel analysis methods is granted direct access to high performance and cloud computing resources.

Developments

Developments at the center particularly address large-scale genomics and post-genomics data integration and exploration. A central objective is the development and provision of a repository of reusable workflows allowing to replicate the analyses of former projects on same or additional data, or to recycle tried-and-tested workflows as a starting point for adaptation and enhancement in new projects.

For further information on the network and what it can do for you please visit the de.NBI web site.

The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant number 031A533A.