The computational team at SAIL strives to make emerging statistical and computational techniques in single cell analytics accessible to the wider MSKCC community. To achieve this goal, our team is tasked with two major responsibilities: 1) standardized data access and processing, and 2) data analytics and methods development. 

At SAIL, we process new single-cell omics data of different modalities every day. As such, we maintain a robust data infrastructure responsible for managing, storing, and processing the single cell genomics and imaging experiments entrusted with our team. We also develop new and modified bioinformatics pipelines in order to accommodate the cutting-edge technologies being developed by SAIL’s experimental side. We primarily utilize Amazon Web Services to store and process data; if you work with SAIL and need any assistance in accessing your data or have any questions, please feel free to attend our weekly office hours where our team is available to provide guidance and support. We also make heavy use of the high-performance computing (HPC) resources available at MSK and are proud users and contributors to the multimodal data platform, Isabl.

Once the data has been processed, SAIL provides various forms of support to enable our collaborators to extract novel biological insights from their data. For example, we have been involved in driving the computational analysis of collected data in close-collaboration with the biological/wet lab group. This typically involves in-depth analysis of the data in which we adapt existing computational tools to better characterize the data and understand the biology (link to example). In addition, we provide general support through a collection of Python Jupyter Notebooks, which can be used by collaborators to analyze data on their own. SAIL organizes regular single-cell computation workshops (see more on Educational Outreach), from which notebooks have been compiled with implementations and explanations of state-of-the-art methods to use for single-cell data analysis (such as normalization, clustering, celltyping, trajectory analysis). These notebooks provide a platform for our collaborators to build their analysis. Furthermore, as a more continuous support system beyond workshops, we provide consultation services during weekly office hours to help guide the analyses and provide ideas. The notebooks are updated on a regular basis to keep up with newer developments in single-cell computation. For example, SAIL benchmarks new tools developed by the single-cell field and aspires to make the most effective methods available to the single-cell community at MSKCC.