Mission:

Supported by the Civitan International Research Center (CIRC), the Neurodevelopmental Bioinformatics Initiative (NBI) is an interdisciplinary resources available to many researchers in campus in the design and analysis of high-throughput transcriptomic and epigenomic studies. The support provided by the NBI core helps advance Civitan's mission to expand our knowledge of neurodevelopmental and intellectual disabilities. Importantly, as an interdisciplinary resource, the NBI extends the support level provided by the CIRC to several research domains.

About the Neurodevelopmental Bioinformatics Initiative (NBI):

The NBI was formally established in 2016 by the Civitan International Research Center to support researchers interested in the utilization of high-throughput genomic technologies to enhance our knowledge of neurodevelopmental and intellectual disabilities. The utilization of next-generation sequencing technology provides an in-depth opportunity to study the molecular alterations and mechanisms related to disabilities such as Down syndrome, autism, Fragile X syndrome, epilepsy, and Rett syndrome.

Today, the NBI is an interdisciplinary resource to researches across several departments to support their bioinformatics needs from a wide-range of next-generation sequencing applications including bulk RNA-seq, epigenomics and single-cell/single-nuclei sequencing. In order to analyze the data in a reproducible and scalable manner the NBI applies robust practices such as 1) maintaining all pipeline and project specific code at UAB's GitLab instance for version control 2) applies Snakemake as our workflow mangament system 3) executes computationally heavy jobs at UAB's High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster, named Cheaha. Further, we are happy to provide project-specific support and discuss with investigators experimental designs, data visualization needs and provide help in manuscript and grant support. To see more details on our services and workflow representation, please visit our "Services page"

As the bioinformatics field rapidly advances, the NBI will ensure that the most updated methods are applied to ongoing and future studies by the Civitan scientists.

Additional Information: