The Australian Bioinformatics Facility in close collaboration with Dr Elizabeth Dennis’ (Plant Industry, CSIRO) and Frances Shannon’ (The John Curtin School of Medical Research, ANU) groups have implemented various computational pipelines to support epigenomics applications using next generation DNA sequencing technologies.

An extensive benchmarking of short read aligner tools was conducted to select the most reliable tool to be utilized in the profiling of microRNAs (miR-seq), conduct genome-wide evaluation of chromatin modifications (ChIP-seq) and identify genome-wide epigenetic modifications (Bi-seq). These computational pipelines have enabled researchers at CSIRO and ANU to process vast amount of data generated by the Illumina/GAII platform into biologically useful information facilitating new discoveries and hypotheses.

The available miR-Seq, ChIP-seq and Bi-seq computational pipelines will be made available to the community through a web-based data analysis environment.