The new resources will accelerate research and discovery across multiple health disciplines.
UNT Health Fort Worth has launched a new High Performance Computing Core and expanded its next-generation sequencing capabilities, providing researchers with a centralized, high-powered computing environment to analyze large datasets, model complex systems and support artificial intelligence-enabled researching.
The HP Core became operational Feb. 2 and will help strengthen UNT Health’s research infrastructure and accelerate discovery across biomedical, clinical and population health sciences, said Sharad Shrestha, Ph.D., Research Core Labs director. It is available to all UNT Health researchers and external collaborators.
“This new computing core gives our researchers the power and flexibility they need to take on increasingly complex questions and move ideas more quickly toward real-world impact,” Shrestha said.
The HPC Core supports research in areas such as genomics, bioinformatics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, medical imaging, population health, molecular modeling, computational biology and much more.
UNT Health has also added two complementary next-generation sequencing platforms, the Illumina NextSeq 2000 and the Vega system, which became available for research use in late January. Together, the instruments allow researchers to perform both short-read and long-read sequencing, expanding the range of genetic and genomic studies that can be conducted in-house.
The NextSeq 2000 supports high-throughput sequencing for a wide range of genetic studies, while the Vega platform introduces long-read sequencing capabilities that enable scientists to study complex regions of DNA and full-length genes in greater detail.
“These technologies dramatically expand what our researchers can do on campus, while reducing turnaround time and cost,” said Dimitrios Karamichos, Ph.D., vice president of research and graduate studies. “They open new possibilities for studying cancer, rare disease, infectious disease, neuroscience, microbiome science and precision medicine, as well as many other areas of scientific inquiry.”
Researchers with questions about these resources may visit www.unthealth.edu/corelabs/index.html.
About UNT Health
UNT Health Fort Worth is located in the heart of the Fort Worth Cultural District. UNT Health trains the health care providers, public health workforce and scientists of the future in an interprofessional ecosystem. Through its six colleges—Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine, College of Biomedical and Translational Sciences, College of Public Health, College of Health Professions, College of Pharmacy and College of Nursing—students learn to work in teams and develop an innovative mindset that prepares them for a rapidly changing health landscape. UNT Health Clinical Practice Group, the clinical enterprise of UNT Health, provides patient-centered care to people across Tarrant County. UNT Health’s research enterprise provides a foundation to expand the frontiers of scientific discovery to improve health and well-being.
