Dr. Spencer Bruce, Director of the Bioinformatics Core at Wadsworth, recently presented during the February State Public Health Bioinformatics (StaPH-B) Monthly Call. StaPH-B is a bioinformatics consortium created by subject matter experts affiliated with the Association of Public Health Laboratories. The consortium represents bioinformaticians from across the United States and internationally who are focused on addressing common barriers to bioinformatics implementation in state and public health laboratories.
Dr. Bruce’s presentation, “Bioinformatics Software: Practical Approaches to Use, Management, and Reuse,” examined how public health laboratories can more effectively manage the open-source tools that underpin modern bioinformatics workflows. He reviewed common installation and deployment approaches, including system package managers, Conda environments, and container platforms, and discussed the tradeoffs among flexibility, reproducibility, and ease of use.
The session also highlighted the importance of workflow orchestration tools such as Nextflow to ensure that multi-step analyses execute consistently across different computing environments. By clearly separating software management, execution environments, and workflow design, laboratories can improve reliability while maintaining the flexibility needed to adapt to infrastructure and resource constraints. Dr. Bruce’s presentation reflects the Wadsworth Center’s continued commitment to strengthening practical, sustainable bioinformatics practices across public health laboratories.