Bioinformatics and Biostatistics

Richard Anney
Eleisa Heron
Elaine Kenny
Derek Morris
Colm O'Dushlaine
Carlos Pinto
Ricardo Segurado

The primary role of the Bioinformatics and Biostatistics team is to provide support to the Neuropsychiatric Genetics Research Group. In addition, the team performs independent research that is focused on critical areas of complex-trait genomic analysis. With increasing numbers of Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) being generated by the group or becoming available through open-access and data-sharing studies, we have put in place a structure to manage and analyse large genotyping datasets (>3 billion SNP observations). Moreover, we are building research infrastructure capacity to manage and analyse data in the 10's of TB for microarray image files (copy-number variation and gene re-sequencing projects.

We provide end-user analysis support for a number of bioinformatic/biostatics packages including Stata, Perl, R-Project, MySQL and C. We also create enabling scripts to semi-automate analysis routines for statistical analysis and genetic analysis programs, e.g. PLINK.

In addition, Bioinformatics and biostatistics team members are attempting to identify those markers that are true findings and limit those that are false-positives;
1. exploring areas of common bias in GWAS datasets
2. applying novel ranking routines for GWAS findings
3. developing statistical analysis routines for GWAS datasets
4. modelling association at the gene and biological pathway level
5. apply evidence-based medicine approaches to GWAS and other genetic epidemiology studies to reduce and limit known biases
6. examine copy-number variation in common disorders such as Autism

Publications and software