MSI is a crucial member of the multi-disciplinary team that develops and supports Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) clinical pipelines that provide cutting-edge genomic diagnostics driving the personalized medical care of patients in the M Health Fairview system. MSI partners with the Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory (MDL), which includes technologists and genetic counselors from Fairview and physician faculty members from the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the U of M, to complete this diverse and talented team. MSI bioinformatics analysts develop bioinformatics pipelines that provide clinical-grade variant calling and copy number analysis from numerous DNA-seq platforms. They work with the clinicians to develop and validate pipelines that meet rigorous clinical testing standards and maintain these validated pipelines during routine clinical use. There are currently eight active pipelines for inherited disease and oncology genetic testing and two whole-genome pipelines are in development for both sequence and structural variant calling. Both new whole-genome pipelines use high memory nodes at MSI.

MSI PIs from the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology involved in this project include Associate Professors Sophia Yohe and Bharat Thyagarajan, and Assistant Professor Andrew Nelson. MSI staff in the Research Informatics Solutions (RIS) group who are currently working on this project include Dr. Sarah Munro (manager, Lab Medicine and Pathology group), and Lab Medicine and Pathology bioinformatics analysts Dr. Todd Knutson, Dr. Rebecca LaRue, Dr. Christine O'Connor, and Dr. Jeffrey Miller. Edward Munsell from the Advanced Systems Operations group and Jaime Vega from the User Gateway Group are active in supporting the pipeline infrastructure. Dr. Christine Henzler (manager, RIS) and scientific computing consultant Dr. Ham Lam from the Scientific Consulting Solutions group made significant contributions to the project in their previous roles in the Lab Medicine and Pathology group.

Research Computing partners:

  • Minnesota Supercomputing Institute
stylized dna molecule superimposed on a tunnel made of binary numbers