Cyberinfrastructure for Biodefense and Emerging and Re- emerging Infectious Diseases

e Cyberinfrastructure Group (CIG) develops and uses methods, infrastructure, and resources to enable scientifi c discoveries in infectious disease research by applying the principles of cyberinfrastructure to integrate data, computational infrastructure, and people (Atkins, 2003). CIG has developed many public resources for curated, diverse molecular and literature data from various infectious disease systems, and implemented the processes, systems, and databases required to support them. It also conducts research applying its methods, infrastructure and data to make new discoveries of its own. CIG participates in education and outreach activities, resulting in scientifi c discoveries and publications, and an outreach program involving development of project-centric cyberinfrastructure courses for the educators from high schools and undergraduate institutions as well as graduates and postgraduates. In the reporting period, key accomplishments include publication of the Brucella abortus S19 genome, deployment of a pipeline to improve genome annotations, phylogenomic analysis of ten rickettsial genomes, publication of an Alphaproteobacteria phylogenetic tree, development of a program to generate oligonucleotide sequences from whole genome sequences, continuing progress in numerous collaborative research projects, and development of an online self-guided bioinformatics tutorial.