Virginia Bioinformatics Institute

The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) is a premier bioinformatics, computational biology, and systems biology research facility that opened on the Blacksburg campus of Virginia Tech in 2000. It houses over two-hundred employees, multiple supercomputing clusters, and several DNA sequencers, including a massively-parallel high-throughput Roche GS-FLX™sequencer. VBI is dedicated to the study of the biological sciences. The research platform of VBI focuses on the "disease triangle" of host-pathogen-environment interactions. By using bioinformatics, which combines transdisciplinary approaches to information technology and biology, researchers at VBI interpret and apply vast amounts of biological data generated from basic research to some of today’s key challenges in the biomedical, environmental and agricultural sciences. Work at VBI involves collaboration in diverse disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, biology, plant pathology, biochemistry, systems biology, statistics, economics and synthetic biology. The institute develops genomic, proteomic and bioinformatic tools that can be applied to the study of infectious diseases as well as the discovery of new vaccine, drug and diagnostic targets.