Bioinformatics Core

The mission of the Bioinformatics Core is to apply and develop cutting-edge bioinformatics tools such as computational and statistical methods that support ongoing research projects within Vitalant Research Institute and those of external collaborators. Current research focus includes metagenomic viral discovery, genomics of HIV pathogenesis and persistence, statistical methods on detection and evaluation of blood-borne infections. The Bioinformatics Core also offers consultation on general computing, data visualization, statistical modeling and machine learning for collaborators.

xdeng@vitalant.org

Xutao Deng, Ph.D., is the head of the Bioinformatics Core. Dr. Deng earned his B.S. degree from the University of Science & Technology of China, his M.S. & Ph.D. degrees in information science from the College of Information Science & Technology at the University of Nebraska and completed his post-doc training in bioinformatics at University of California Los Angeles. Dr. Deng has extensive experience in bioinformatics and biostatistics and has published more than 80 papers since 2005.

Publications

National Library of Medicine Biography

Research Interest

Xutao Deng's research focuses on developing, evaluating, and implementing bioinformatic, statistical, and machine learning methods for analyzing high-throughput biological data in transfusion medicine and infectious diseases. He specializes in omics analyses, including NGS-based single-cell transcriptomics, statistical genetics, proteomics, metagenomic virus discovery, and genome-wide association studies (GWAS). He has gained in-depth knowledge and hands-on expertise in omics, genetic epidemiology, multivariate statistics, algorithm design, and software development. We have also established strong computing resources, including more than 300 CPUs, 2 TB of RAM, and 100 TB of storage space, with additional bioinformatics pipelines deployed on Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) for scalable computing power. All of these resources will be fully available to support the proposed project.

Bioinformatics