Overview
The Bioinformatics Core Facility serves as a centralized resource for providing expert and timely bioinformatics consulting, analysis, collaborative research, management, and training solutions for high-throughput data. The data includes different kinds of “omics” data (e.g., genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomes, proteomics, metabolomics, metagenomics data), which are generated from a variety of platforms such as PCR, microarray, NGS, mass-spec, and so on. The core provides high-level expertise in bioinformatics, ensuring the support needed to design, conduct, analyze, interpret and manage results requiring or facilitated by informatics applications. Bioinformatics support will be integrated into all phases of basic, clinical and translational research through a coordinated program of bioinformatics consultation and analysis.
The Bioinformatics Core Facility aims to build and maintain as an infrastructure resource that enables the application of strong bioinformatics solutions with a measurable impact on the ability of JABSOM and UH investigators to both publish their work and obtain new funding.
Services
The Bioinformatics Core Facility provides the following services in hopes of building and maintaining an infrastructure that enables the applications of strong informatics solutions:
Consultation
Experimental Design and Power Calculations – We highly encourage you to consult our bioinformatician prior to experiments to find a solution that fits your needs and budget. We will help design your experiments to obtain maximum leverage and perform data quality control checks for high-throughput data projects.
Liaison with vendors: We will help identify the right product to ensure the quality of your research.
Data Analysis
- Next Generation Sequence Analysis
- Assembly and gene annotation
- DNA-Seq
- RNA-Seq including fusion gene and LncRNA
- Small RNA-Seq
- Chip-Seq
- Target-Seq
- Meth-Seq
- Metagenomics
- Microarray data analysis
- Gene expression
- Exon array for alternative splicing
- SNP array, GWIS
- miRNA array
- DNA methylation array
- CNV
- Proteomics data and Protein array
- Protein mass-spec data for protein expression and interaction
- Phosphor-screen
- Glycol-screen
- PTM (post translation modicication) Profilling
- Metobolomics data analysis
- Sugar profiling
- Entire metabolomics data analysis
- Feature selection algorithms
- Classification algorithms
- Gene and sample correlation and clustering analysis
- Gene enrichment analysis
- Gene ontology and pathway analysis
- Gene network analysis
- Integrative "omics" data analysis
Grant Support
We will provide hardware and software support for UH researchers who plan to conduct preliminary data analysis for hypothesis development and testing as part of grant proposal writing. We will provide necessary guidance to include computational biological methods to analyze data in your research analysis plan. Letters of support for your grant proposal can be prepared upon request.
Data Management Service
We will provide data management services and develop a web-based database for collection, storage, integration, and management of clinical data and scientific research data.
Collaborative Research
We are involved in collaborative research of several principal investigators from different UH departments and campuses. We perform bioinformatics data analysis by running routine bioinformatics applications and custom programs developed specifically to fulfill our research objectives.
Members
Youping Deng, Ph.D. | Professor and Director, Bioinformatics Core Facility
Email: dengy@hawaii.edu
Phone: (808) 692-1664
Vedbar Khadka, Ph.D. | Assistant Professor
Email: vedbar@hawaii.edu
Phone: (808) 692-1462
Yujia Qin, Ph.D. | Bioinformatician
Email: yqin@hawaii.edu
Yuanyuan Fu, Ph.D. | Post-Doctoral Researcher
Email: fuy@hawaii.edu
Phone: (808) 692-1529
Mayumi Jijiwa, M.D., Ph.D. | Post-Doctoral Researcher
Email: jijiwa@hawaii.edu
Phone: (808) 692-1531
Masaki Nasu, Ph.D. | Post-Doctoral Researcher
Email: mnasu@hawaii.edu
Phone: (808) 692-1670
Sudhir Rai, Ph.D. | Post-Doctoral Researcher
Email: raisk21@hawaii.edu
Shaoqiu Chen, B.S. | Ph.D. Graduate Research Assistant
Email: shaoqiu@hawaii.edu
Yu Chen | Ph.D. Graduate Research Assistant
Email: yuchen8@hawaii.edu
Ting Gong, M.S. | Ph.D. Graduate Research Assistant
Email: tgong@hawaii.edu
Phone: (808) 692-1613
Zitong Gao, M.S. | Graduate Research Assistant
Email: zitong@hawaii.edu
Isam B. Mohd Ibrahim | Graduate Research Assistant
Email: isambmi@hawaii.edu
Emory Zitello | Graduate Research Assistant
Email: ez9@hawaii.edu
Hua Yang, MBA | Manager
Email: yanghua@hawaii.edu
Phone: (808) 692-1529
Seminars/Workshops
We offer seminars workshops depending on the interest of our research community. Our faculty members have mentored visiting scholars, students, and trainees, and have served as thesis and dissertation committee members of graduate students from across campus.
Note: For upcoming seminars or workshops, please contact us for details.
Publications
If you utilize the Bioinformatics Core Facility in publications, abstracts, posters, and oral presentations, please insert the following acknowledgement as a result from the services provided to you:
"XXX(Individual initials) was(were) partially supported by grant U54MD007584 from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities as well as grants P20GM103466 and P30GM114737 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences from the National Institutes of Health. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH."
List of Selected Publications
- Dye CK, Corley MJ, Li D, Khadka VS, Mitchell BI, Sultana R, Lum-Jones A, Shikuma CM, Ndhlovu LC, Maunakea AK. Comparative DNA methylomic analyses reveal potential origins of novel epigenetic biomarkers of insulin resistance in monocytes from virally suppressed HIV infected adults. Clinical Epigenetics. 2019 Jul;11(1):95. doi:doi.org/10.1186/s13148-019-0694-1. PubMed PMID: 31253200; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6599380.
- Sasuclark AR, Khadka VS, Pitts MW. Cell-type specific analysis of selenium-related genes in brain. Antioxidants. 2019 May;8(5):120. doi:10.3390/antiox8050120. PubMed PMID: 31060314; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6562762.
- Deng Y, Zhu Y, Wang H, Khadka VS, Hu L, Ai J, Dou Y, Li Y, Dai S, Mason CE, Wang Y, Jia W, Zhang J, Huang G, Jiang B. A ratio-based method to identify true biomarkers by normalizing circulating ncRNA sequencing and quantitative PCR data. Analytical Chemistry. 2019 May 21;91(10):6746-6753. doi:10.1021/acs.analchem.9b00821. PubMed PMID: 31002238.
- Fang R, Zhu Y, Khadka VS, Zhang F, Jiang B, Deng Y. The evaluation of serum biomarkers for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) diagnosis. Frontiers in Physiology. 2018 Nov;9(1710):1-6. doi:10.3389/fphys.2018.01710. PubMed PMID: 30555348; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6281717.
- Sah N, Kuehu DL, Khadka VS, Deng Y, Peplowska K, Jha R, Mishra B. RNA sequencing-based analysis of the laying hen uterus revealed the novel genes and biological pathways involved in the eggshell biomineralization. Scientific Reports. 2018 Nov;2018(8):1-12. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-35203-y. PubMed PMID: 30443032; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6237962.
Bioinformatics Resources
Bioinformatics Data Repositories and Tools
NCBI GenBank
Database of nucleotide and protein sequence dataEMBL-EBI
Database of nucleotide and protein sequence dataDDBJ
Database of nucleotide and protein sequence dataPfam
Database of protein familiesArrayExpress
Database of high-throughput functional genomics dataNCBI CDD
Conserved Domain Database is a protein annotation resourceMGI: Mouse Genome Informatics
Database and bioinformatics resource on the genetics, genomics, and biology of mouseTIGER
Database of tissue-specific gene expression and regulation dataCancer Genome Anatomy Project
Database of normal, pre-cancerous and cancerous genomesRCSB Protein Databank
Repository of 3D structures of large biological molecules, including proteins and nucleic acidsNCBI GEO
Repository of functional genomics (both array- and sequence-based) dataENCODE
Repository of Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) dataExPASy
Resource portal includes databases and tools in different areas of life sciences including proteomics, genomics, structural bioinformatics, systems biology, phylogeny, population genetics, transcriptomics, drug design, and others.TCGA
The cancer genome atlas data portalSmart
Tool for protein domains identification and analysisElliPro: Antibody Epitope Prediction
Tool to predict and analyze immune epitopesQuickGo
Tool for gene ontology searching
Bioinformatics Tools and Software
Computational Resources
- In-House
- QHS Beowulf Cluster
- Consists of 3 nodes and two nodes of 14 Cores and 256 GB RAM each.
- QHS Beowulf Cluster
- On-Campus
- UH ITS HPC Resource
- Consists of 276 nodes based on the Cray CS300.
- UH ITS HPC Resource
Software Resources
- Array Suite
- Ingenuity Pathway Analysis
- CLC Genomic Workbench 9
- CLC Drug Discovery Workbench 3

University of Hawaiʻi John A. Burns School of Medicine
651 Ilalo Street
Biological Sciences Building, Suite 222
Honolulu, HI 96813
Director: Youping Deng, Ph.D.
Phone: (808) 692-1664
Email: dengy@hawaii.edu (Youping Deng),
or vedbar@hawaii.edu (Vedbar Khadka)