Tree of Life Informatics Infrastructure

Tree of Life Programme

The Informatics Infrastructure team oversees the implementation and delivery of the genome assembly pipelines in the Tree of Life programme, and provides support for large-scale genome analyses for the faculty teams.

The Tree of Life projects will generate tens of thousands of high-quality genomes over the coming years – more than have ever been sequenced! It is a challenging and extremely exciting task that will shape the future of biology, and the team’s role is to provide the platform for assembling and analysing those genomes at an unprecedented scale.

We are the interface between the Tree of Life teams (assembly production and faculty research) and Sanger’s IT teams, working together with the informatics teams of the other programmes. The work involves a wide range of scientific fields and technologies such as assembly methods, genomics, comparative genomics, cloud computing, large-scale analyses, with a strong emphasis on metadata tracking, quality controls, and event recording.

The team uses a wide range of technologies, frameworks and programming languages, including Nextflow, Python, Conda, Jira, LSF, Singularity, and Kubernetes. The technology wheel below shows most of their logos. How many can you recognise ? Let us know on the Sanger Tree of Life Twitter account.