Bioinformatics support
We have excellent bioinformatics facilities and support based in the School.
Edinburgh Genomics

- UK’s largest open-access sequencing facility
- Offers support from conception to publication
- Provide design advice
- A range of NGS library preparations
- Next Generation sequencing on latest Illumina, PacBio and Oxford Nanopore machines, plus sanger dideoxy sequencing
- Bioinformatics analyses of your data using dedicated high performance computing and advanced software
- Introductory to advanced level training in genomics and bioinformatics
Our team are experienced in many NGS analysis procedures including RNA-seq differential expression; genome and transcriptiome assembly and annotation; metagenomics/metabarcoding; variant analysis.
Edinburgh Genomics Clinical (EGC) division based at the Roslin Institute specialises in providing whole genome sequencing (WGS) by means of a fully automated workflow.
We are happy to offer 'bioinformatics only' collaborations or consultations.
Donald Dunbar
Bioinformatics Operations Manager
- Genome Science division
- Edinburgh Genomics
Contact details
- Email: donald.dunbar@ed.ac.uk
- Web: Edinburgh Genomics
Ashworth Bioinformatics Club
We hold a regular NextGen Bioinformatics Journal Club in the Ashworth Building, where we discuss recent papers and software, with a particular focus on understanding algorithms and tools for large scale analyses. Everyone is welcome! If you want to be put on the mailing list for these meetings, please contact us.
ashworth-bioinformatics-club@googlegroups.com
Next Generation Bioinformatics User Group
We also coordinate the Next Generation Bioinformatics User Group (NextGenBUG), a Scotland-wide, gathering where bioinformaticians across the area meet, present their work, listen to invited speakers and discuss issues and solutions. The meetings rotate round the Scottish universities.
Next Generation Bioinformatics User Group
Wellcome Trust for Cell Biology: Bioinformatics Core Facility

Training
An autumn seminar series and an Easter practical series that are integrated into the Wellcome 4 year PhD programme but are open for others to attend.
Facilities
Shared workstations with the COIL facility as well as several dedicated bioinformatics servers hosting:
- Galaxy server containing around 300 bioinformatics tools, biological workflows, data libraries for sharing large datasets, collaboration functions and data visualisation. Note that the Galaxy server is currently being developed for use with the Linux cluster 'Eddie' in collaboration with EDCF
- BLAST server for searching custom databases
- EMBOSS and EMBASSY suite of tools
- GBrowse, GBrowse2 and a Distributed Annotation Server [DAS] for data
- Visualisation and data sharing
- Latest versions of Bioconductor (R), BioPerl, BioPython and BioRuby
- Latest next-generation sequence assemblers including BowTie, Novoalign and Velvet
- Many more bioinformatics programs, including HMMER, GLIMMER and the nucleosome predictor from the Segal lab
Centre Optical Instrumentation Laboratory website
Analysis
We perform a wide range of requests encompassing both focused analysis of single locus/gene/protein and the analysis of high throughput data such as microarray, next-generation sequence and pre-processed proteomics data.
