Frequently Asked Questions

SyncBio Answers To Common Questions.

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Our Expertise

    • You only pay for bioinformatics services when needed, avoiding ongoing costs like salaries and overhead.
    • Services can be adjusted based on fluctuating demands.
    • Access to the expertise of a full bioinformatics team is available.
    • You won’t have to manage daily bioinformatics projects, reducing the need for junior hires.
    • Contracting an external team ensures consistent service, even if individual staff leave.
    • It's very likely we have relevant experience. Our scientists come from diverse backgrounds, and over the years, we've worked with clients across various life sciences in both academia and industry. While each project is unique, we have likely encountered data sets, analyses, and research questions similar to yours.
    • Our adaptability service model supports a wide range of bioinformatics queries. To learn more about our capabilities, it's best to contact us directly.
    • We start with rigorous data quality checks to identify potential issues early. Our analyses use advanced methods, and you can request specific techniques. Our academic research background ensures high-quality results.

Benefits of bioinformatics services as a service

    • Using a bioinformatics service offers flexibility, cost savings, access to a skilled team, and eliminates the need for project management or supervision of less experienced staff. It also provides more security for retaining knowledge compared to relying on a single employee who may leave.
    • Yes, We’re glad to help you understand our process and even guide you through analyzing the data yourself if you're interested in learning a specific analysis. We offer personalized training through googlemeet and provide analysis scripts for you to apply to future datasets.

Starting the project

    • It's straightforward: just spend one hour meeting with us, and we'll give you a free quote that includes a customized bioinformatics plan for your project. After receiving the plan, you can decide how to use it and choose your project partner.
    • You don’t need to define the contracted bioinformatics work in detail. We only need to understand how the data was generated and what your research questions are. From there, we can plan the workflow accordingly.
    • Yes, we can create a customized bioinformatics plan for your grant application, including a schedule and budget. We can also conduct preliminary analyses on your existing or public data to bolster your application.
    • No, you don't need any bioinformatics expertise. We will talk about your needs and then plan the implementation accordingly.
    • You can deliver your data to us by using a file-sharing service, uploading files via an SFTP connection, or sending an external hard drive to our office, but be sure to keep local copies as a backup before sending.
    • For a typical customer, we start with three months of our Research, Multiomics, or Software service, with the option to extend monthly. The Enterprise plan lasts for 12 months, also with an option for yearly renewal.
    • We conduct comprehensive computational quality control before proceeding with downstream analyses. If any quality concerns arise, we'll work with you to determine the best course of action. If re-running the experiments is the most suitable option, we can put the project on hold until that is completed.
    • Absolutely! We will keep you informed about our progress and discuss intermediate results with you to agree on the next set of deliverables and their timelines. We’re happy to accommodate any changes to your requirements, and your dedicated project manager is always available to discuss and implement your plans.

About the project

    • Yes, to a significant extent. We will keep you informed about our progress and may want to discuss data quality or intermediate results with you to agree on the final deliverables. We are happy to adjust to what we observe in the data and your evolving requirements, as long as they align with the resources allocated in the original quote. You will have a dedicated project manager available for any inquiries throughout the project.
    • The project cost depends on the time required from our team. We have developed efficient computational pipelines for quality control, data processing, visualization, and reporting, enabling faster analyses. Each project is customized, and costs for software, computing, and project management are included in the overall price unless otherwise agreed. Before starting, we provide a project plan and cost estimate, and we keep you updated on time spent and expectations for future steps. Together, we can prioritize tasks to maximize cost-efficiency, and you can be assured that there will be no unexpected invoices.
    • After you accept our quotation, there is typically a lead time of a couple of weeks before we can begin working full-time on your project. During the project, you may need time to process the intermediate results we present and discuss them with your team and collaborators before finalizing the next steps, which could extend the overall project duration. However, this will not increase the project cost as long as we are not actively working on it. Generally, the turnaround time from signing the quote to receiving the final project deliverables ranges from two weeks to two months.

After the project

    • In short, we can provide nearly any deliverable you need. For a data analysis project, the standard deliverable includes a detailed project report outlining our workflow and methods, results presented in tables and figures, and our key conclusions. We can also customize figures and write text for a manuscript if desired. For a software project, the deliverable consists of the software itself along with all relevant documentation.
    • Before we finalize the report, we present all our findings to you to ensure that you fully understand what we have done, what the results mean, and that you have received everything you need related to the project.
    • Yes, we are eager to help you understand our work and can also guide you in analyzing the data independently if you're interested in learning specific analyses. This is done through personalized training via teleconferences and by providing analysis scripts for your future datasets.
    • Yes, you will maintain ownership of your intellectual property. We do not retain any rights to your data or results, and we will not disclose them to any third party.
    • No, we do not require authorship. While some customers have asked us to co-author in the past, it is not mandatory. However, it's often considered good practice to acknowledge us, for instance, in the ‘Methods’ section of a paper. You can view our own publications here.

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