Resources

Prostate Tissue Core

The Michigan Center for Translational Pathology (MCTP) is associated with the Prostate Cancer Specialized Project of Research Excellence (SPORE) Tissue Core Lab. The SPORE Biospecimen/Pathology Core serves as a repository for invaluable prostate cancer tissue specimens, which are utilized by the physician-scientists and researchers for unlocking the mysteries of prostate cancer development. This repository includes tissues from radical prostectomies and tissues from metastatic prostate cancer obtained through the rapid autopsy program.

The availability of this priceless resource greatly facilitates research advances in the etiology of prostate cancer. Critical research information from such specimens is data linked to both clinical and pathological databases for the dissemination of comprehensive data information worldwide. Such samples also serve as the foundation for the identification of new biomarkers, characterization of molecular subtypes of cancer, and development of new prognostic tests to translate research discoveries into practical realities for patient treatment.

For more information, please visit the Michigan Prostate SPORE website.

Bioinformatics Resources

Oncomine Research Edition is a powerful web application that integrates and unifies high-throughput cancer profiling data so that target expression across a large volume of cancer types can be assessed online, in seconds. This edition is based on the original Oncomine product provided by the University of Michigan to the academic community. It remains under a free license for non-commercial users pursuing non-commercial purposes.

ChimeraScan is an open-source software package for the discovery of chimeric transcription between two independent transcripts in high-throughput transcriptome sequencing data.

Oculus is a software package that attaches to standard aligners and exploits read redundancy by performing streaming compression, alignment, and decompression of input sequences. We expect that streaming read compressors such as Oculus could become a standard addition to existing RNA-Seq and ChIP-Seq alignment pipelines and potentially other applications in the future as throughput increases.