The mission of the WV-INBRE, as part of the NIH Institutional Development Award (IDeA) Program is to establish a consortium among selected institutions of higher education in the State of West Virginia to enhance their capacity for educating and training their faculty and students in biomedical research.
Dr. Gary Rankin is currently the principal investigator of the NIH-funded West Virginia IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (WV-INBRE). In this capacity, he oversees a state-wide network composed primarily of new investigators at primarily undergraduate institutions across West Virginia and serves as a mentor for several of them.
WV INBRE Bioinformatics Core:
The mission of the WV-INBRE Bioinformatics Core Facility is to provide bioinformatics support and training for researchers in the WV-INBRE network. We have established analysis pipelines for expression profiling by RNA-Seq, using DESeq2, and variant calling for whole exome and whole genome data via GATK. Support for WV-INBRE researchers includes submission of data sets to public repositories, documentation of all methods used, contributions to manuscript methods and results sections preparation, and grant applications.
Key people:
Jim Denvir – WV INBRE Bioinformatics Core Director (Faculty at Marshall University)
Profile link: WV-INBRE – James Denvir, PhD
Dr. Denvir is an Associate Professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine at Marshall University.
Dr. Denvir currently serves as the Director of the WV-INBRE Bioinformatics Core Facility, providing analysis, management, and interpretation of high-throughput sequencing data for WV-INBRE investigators. His research interests include the application of genomics and genetics to complex disease, and reproducibility and robustness of data analyses in a high-throughput data environment.
Dr. Denvir is the author and lecturer of the Biostatistics course in the Department of Biomedical Sciences.
Nicole Garrison – WV INBRE faculty (Faculty at West Liberty University)
Profile link: Nicole Garrison – Biology Professor – West Liberty University
Dr. Nicole Garrison returned to her roots and joined West Liberty University’s biology department. Garrison chose to return to West Liberty because of her fondness of the learning environment that a small school like West Liberty offers. In addition, she added that West Liberty is, “a fantastic place to do creative research with undergraduate students.”
Garrison attended West Liberty University for her undergrad Bachelor of Science in biology and chemistry. She then went on to obtain her PhD from Auburn University. Her dissertation was in biological sciences with a focus on evolutionary biology and phylogenomic.
Her interest in becoming an educator in this field is because she feels bioinformatics is an increasingly important field of biology; however, there is a lack of formal courses and programs that introduce biology students to the discipline.
“I am trying to fix that at West Liberty by developing a bioinformatics major where students can gain skills that will be useful in graduate school and beyond,” said Garrison.
Bioinformatics Training:
The WV INBRE program offers an annual Summer Bioinformatics Bootcamp (wvinbrebootcamp.github.io) which follows the “just-in time” model of bioinformatics training. The program was conducted first in 2021 for undergraduates students from across WV. This bootcamp lasted 3 weeks and covered topics such as transcriptomic data analysis using processing, analysis, visualization and annotation tools as well as project-oriented training on SARS-COV-2 variant calling. The program resulted in 4 research poster presentations where pairs of students compared bioinformatics pipelines and analyzed RNA-seq data for pathway analysis using Cytoscape.