Biological Data Management & Technology Center

The Biological Data Management and Technology Center (BDMTC) serves as a source of expertise in and provides support for data management and bioinformatics tool development projects at the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), the Life Sciences and Physical Biosciences Divisions at LBNL, Biomedical Centers at UCSF, the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3), and other similar organizations in the Bay Area. The Center enables collaborating organizations to share experience, expertise, technology, and results across projects, employing industry practices in developing data management systems and bioinformatics tools, while maintaining academic high standards for the underlying data generation, interpretation, and analysis methods and algorithms.

The BDMTC marked its first anniversary in 2005 with the release of the Integrated Microbial Genomes (IMG) system, a complex data management system developed in collaboration with the Joint Genome Institute. Developed as a community resource, IMG integrates JGI’s microbial genome data with publicly available microbial genome data, and thus provides a powerful comparative context for microbial genome analysis. While the IMG is the first “product” BDMTC has helped bring to market, it demonstrates the viability of the driving force behind the center, said BDMTC head Victor Markowitz.

An experimental version of IMG containing microbial community metagenome data is available in IMG/M.