Databases and service

Wits Bioinformatics provides a number of services for the Wits and broader bioinformatics community.

Consulting 

We have capacity to provide some consulting for projects which require bioinformatics, including tool and technique advice and some training. For significant help, we would expect to become research collaborators or make some other arrangement. Projects which require significant bioinformatics expertise should be discussed with us at proposal stage. Please see our guidelines and service request form.

Tools 

We have a number of on-line tools available for bioinformatics. Our wEMBOSS server is used for training as well as by researchers who need to use bioinformatics tools. We also run a Galaxy service. We also develop our own tools. The Genesis tool can be used to display PCA and structure/admixture charts for population studies based on genotype data. We also have a collection of other scripts that can be used to help GWAS and population studies.

High-Performance Computing 

We run a research computer cluster which is available to members of the bioinformatics community. The cluster contains 450 cores and roughly 350TB of data storage. We have some large memory machines (768GB). This is also a node on the SA National Compute Grid.

Databases 

We mirror some of the key databases including Genbank and PDB and we can mirror or host other data bases.