Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute Logo
Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute Logo
  • About
  • Science
    • Laboratories
    • Office of Research Development
    • Clinical & Translational Research
      Participating in Research
    • Departments
      Biomedical Engineering Cancer Biology Cardiovascular & Metabolic Sciences Florida Research & Innovation Center Genomic Medicine Immunotherapy & Precision Immuno-Oncology
      Infection Biology Inflammation & Immunity Neurosciences Ophthalmic Research Quantitative Health Sciences Translational Hematology & Oncology Research
    • Centers & Programs
      Advanced Musculoskeletal Imaging Angiogenesis Center Cardiovascular Diagnostics & Prevention Computational Life Sciences Consortium for Pain Genitourinary Malignancies Research Genome Center
      Microbiome & Human Health Musculoskeletal Research Northern Ohio Alcohol Center Pathogen & Human Health Research Populations Health Research Quantitative Metabolic Research Therapeutics Discovery
  • Core Services
    • Ohio
      3D Printing Bioimage AnalysisBioRobotics & Mechanical Testing Cell Culture Cleveland Clinic BioRepository Computational Oncology Platform Computing Services Discovery Lab Electron Microscopy Electronics Engineering
      Flow CytometryGenomic Medicine Institute Biorepository Genomics Glassware Histology Hybridoma Immunohistochemistry Immunomonitoring Lab Instrument Refurbishing & Repair Laboratory Diagnostic
      Lerner Research Institute BioRepository Light MicroscopyMechanical Prototyping Microbial Culturing & Engineering Microbial Sequencing & Analytics Resources Media Preparation Molecular Biotechnology Nitinol Polymer Proteomics & Metabolomics Therapeutics Discovery
    • Florida
      Bioinformatics
      Flow Cytometry
      Imaging
  • Education & Training
    • Graduate Programs Molecular Medicine PhD Program Postdoctoral Program
      Research Intensive Summer Experience (RISE) Undergraduate & High School Programs
  • News
  • Careers
    • Faculty Positions Research Associate & Project Staff Postdoctoral Positions Technical & Administrative Engagement & Belonging
  • Donate
  • Contact
  • About
  • Science
    • Scientific Programs
    • Laboratories
    • Office of Research Development
    • Clinical & Translational Research
      Participating in Research
    • Departments
      Biomedical Engineering Cancer Biology Cardiovascular & Metabolic Sciences Florida Research & Innovation Center Genomic Medicine Immunotherapy & Precision Immuno-Oncology
      Infection Biology Inflammation & Immunity Neurosciences Ophthalmic Research Quantitative Health Sciences Translational Hematology & Oncology Research
    • Centers & Programs
      Advanced Musculoskeletal Imaging Angiogenesis Center Cardiovascular Diagnostics & Prevention Computational Life Sciences Consortium for Pain Genitourinary Malignancies Research Genome Center
      Microbiome & Human Health Musculoskeletal Research Northern Ohio Alcohol Center Pathogen & Human Health Research Populations Health Research Quantitative Metabolic Research Therapeutics Discovery
  • Core Services
    • All Cores
    • Ohio
      3D Printing Bioimage Analysis BioRobotics & Mechanical Testing Cell Culture Cleveland Clinic BioRepository Computational Oncology Platform Computing Services Discovery Lab Electron Microscopy Electronics Engineering >
      Flow CytometryGenomic Medicine Institute BiorepositoryGenomics Glassware Histology Hybridoma Immunohistochemistry Immunomonitoring Lab Instrument Refurbishing & Repair Laboratory Diagnostic
      Lerner Research Institute BioRepository Light MicroscopyMechanical Prototyping Microbial Culturing & Engineering Microbial Sequencing & Analytics Resources Media Preparation Molecular Biotechnology Nitinol Polymer Proteomics & Metabolomics Therapeutics Discovery
    • Florida
      Bioinformatics
      Flow Cytometry
      Imaging
  • Education & Training
    • Research Education & Training Center
    • Graduate Programs Molecular Medicine PhD Program Postdoctoral Program
      Research Intensive Summer Experience (RISE) Undergraduate & High School Programs
  • News
  • Careers
    • Faculty Positions Research Associate & Project Staff Postdoctoral Positions Technical & AdministrativeEngagement & Belonging
  • Donate
  • Contact
  • Search

Daniel Blankenberg Laboratory

❮Center for Computational Life Sciences Daniel Blankenberg Laboratory
  • Daniel Blankenberg Laboratory
  • Principal Investigator
  • Research
  • Our Team
  • Publications
  • Careers
  • Research News

Principal Investigator

Daniel Blankenberg Headshot

Daniel Blankenberg, PhD

Assistant Staff
Email: [email protected]
Location: Cleveland Clinic Main Campus

Research

The explosion of computational data that heralds the ‘-omics’ age provides a unique set of challenges and opportunities. We have more access to information about human biology, health and disease than ever, with scientists increasingly turning to ‘big data’ to learn more about such complex topics as: 

  • Human genetics, including what genetic information is associated with disease 
  • Gene regulation, including how errors in the way the body interprets genetic information can lead to human disease
  • Protein activities, expression levels and behaviors that are associated with health and disease
  • Associations between human behavior and disease
  • How all the previous factors interact in human disease 

However, the amount of available data is increasing at a rate that our current analysis techniques cannot keep up with. 

Opportunities in biology and human health will exceed anything seen before but will only bear fruit if researchers have access to the tools and means to analyze ‘big data’ in a reproducible, transparent and collaborative fashion.  

The goal of the Blankenberg Lab is to develop the robust and accessible computational tools needed to analyze these datasets.  


Biography


Education & Professional Highlights

 "CIMER Trained Mentor" indicates the principal investigator has completed mentorship training based on curriculum from the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research, aimed at advancing mentoring relationships and promoting cultural change in research.

Research

Research

Propelling Research through the Omics Age
The massive deluge of biomedical data that has privileged the contemporary scientific community is only the tip of the iceberg. With each technological advance, the wealth of biological data grows at an increasing rate.

 

Opportunities in biology and human health will exceed anything seen before, but will only bear fruit if researchers have access to the tools and means to analyze ‘big data’ in a reproducible, transparent, and collaborative fashion.

 

The explosion of data that heralds the ‘omics’ age provides a unique set of challenges and opportunities.

 

The Blankenberg lab is developing a collaborative computational biology research program that produces new algorithms and tools for the analysis of increasingly large and complex ‘omic’ datasets. This includes:

  1. building computational resources and approaches that enable individuals and communities, regardless of their background, to effectively and reproducibly use high-throughput data and analysis tools for data-intensive science
  2. empowering collaborative analysis and dissemination of human health datasets across all strata of métier
  3. developing new, high-performance, computing-ready tools and algorithms for biomedical applications.

Our Team

Our Team

Publications

Selected Publications

View publications for Daniel Blankenberg, PhD
(Disclaimer: This search is powered by PubMed, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. PubMed is a third-party website with no affiliation with Cleveland Clinic.)


  1. Afgan E, Baker D, van den Beek M, Blankenberg D, Bouvier D, Čech M, Chilton J, Clements D, Coraor N, Eberhard C, Grüning B, Guerler A, Hillman-Jackson J, Von Kuster G, Rasche E, Soranzo N, Turaga N, Taylor J, Nekrutenko A, Goecks J. The Galaxy platform for accessible, reproducible and collaborative biomedical analyses: 2016 update. Nucleic Acids Res. 2016 May 2.
  2. Qu K, Garamszegi S, Wu F, Thorvaldsdottir H, Liefeld T, Ocana M, Borges-Rivera D, Pochet N, Robinson JT, Demchak B, Hull T, Ben-Artzi G, Blankenberg D, Barber GP, Lee BT, Kuhn RM, Nekrutenko A, Segal E, Ideker T, Reich M, Regev A, Chang HY, Mesirov JP. Integrative genomic analysis by interoperation of bioinformatics tools in GenomeSpace. Nat Methods. 2016 Jan 18.
  3. Blankenberg D, Taylor J, Nekrutenko A. Online resources for genomic analysis using high-throughput sequencing. Cold Spring Harb Protoc. 2015 Feb 5;2015(4):pdb.top083667.
  4. Blankenberg D, Johnson JE; Galaxy Team, Taylor J, Nekrutenko A. Wrangling Galaxy's reference data. Bioinformatics. 2014 Jul 1;30(13):1917-9.
  5. Blankenberg D, Von Kuster G, Bouvier E, Baker D, Afgan E, Stoler N; Galaxy Team, Taylor J, Nekrutenko A. Dissemination of scientific software with Galaxy ToolShed. Genome Biol. 2014 Feb 20;15(2):403.
  6. Rebolledo-Jaramillo B, Su MS, Stoler N, McElhoe JA, Dickins B, Blankenberg D, Korneliussen TS, Chiaromonte F, Nielsen R, Holland MM, Paul IM, Nekrutenko A, Makova KD. Maternal age effect and severe germ-line bottleneck in the inheritance of human mitochondrial DNA. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2014 Oct 28;111(43):15474-9.
  7. Blankenberg D, Hillman-Jackson J. Analysis of next-generation sequencing data using Galaxy. Methods Mol Biol. 2014;1150:21-43.
  8. Dickins B, Rebolledo-Jaramillo B, Su MS, Paul IM, Blankenberg D, Stoler N, Makova KD, Nekrutenko A. Controlling for contamination in re-sequencing studies with a reproducible web-based phylogenetic approach. Biotechniques. 2014 Mar 1;56(3):134-6, 138-41.
  9. Minevich G, Park DS, Blankenberg D, Poole RJ, Hobert O. CloudMap: a cloudbased pipeline for analysis of mutant genome sequences. Genetics. 2012 Dec;192(4):1249-69.
  10. Mouse ENCODE Consortium, Stamatoyannopoulos JA, Snyder M, Hardison R, Ren B, Gingeras T, Gilbert DM, Groudine M, Bender M, Kaul R, Canfield T, Giste E, Johnson A, Zhang M, Balasundaram G, Byron R, Roach V, Sabo PJ, Sandstrom R, Stehling AS, Thurman RE, Weissman SM, Cayting P, Hariharan M, Lian J, Cheng Y, Landt SG, Ma Z, Wold BJ, Dekker J, Crawford GE, Keller CA, Wu W, Morrissey C, Kumar SA, Mishra T, Jain D, Byrska-Bishop M, Blankenberg D, Lajoie1 BR, Jain G, Sanyal A, Chen KB, Denas O, Taylor J, Blobel GA, Weiss MJ, Pimkin M, Deng W, Marinov GK, Williams BA, Fisher-Aylor KI, Desalvo G, Kiralusha A, Trout D, Amrhein H, Mortazavi A, Edsall L, McCleary D, Kuan S, Shen Y, Yue F, Ye Z, Davis CA, Zaleski C, Jha S, Xue C, Dobin A, Lin W, Fastuca M, Wang H, Guigo R, Djebali S, Lagarde J, Ryba T, Sasaki T, Malladi VS, Cline MS, Kirkup VM, Learned K, Rosenbloom KR, Kent WJ, Feingold EA, Good PJ, Pazin M, Lowdon RF, Adams LB. An encyclopedia of mouse DNA elements (Mouse ENCODE). Genome Biol. 2012 Aug 13;13(8):418.
  11. Hillman-Jackson J, Clements D, Blankenberg D, Taylor J, Nekrutenko A; Galaxy Team. Using Galaxy to perform large-scale interactive data analyses. Curr Protoc Bioinformatics. 2012 Jun;Chapter 10:Unit10.5.
  12. Blankenberg D, Taylor J, Nekrutenko A; Galaxy Team. Making whole genome multiple alignments usable for biologists. Bioinformatics. 2011 Sep 1;27(17):2426-8.
  13. Blankenberg D, Coraor N, Von Kuster G, Taylor J, Nekrutenko A; Galaxy Team. Integrating diverse databases into a unified analysis framework: a Galaxy approach. Database (Oxford). 2011 Apr 29.
  14. Blankenberg D, Gordon A, Von Kuster G, Coraor N, Taylor J, Nekrutenko A; Galaxy Team. Manipulation of FASTQ data with Galaxy. Bioinformatics. 2010 Jul 15;26(14):1783-5.
  15. Blankenberg D, Von Kuster G, Coraor N, Ananda G, Lazarus R, Mangan M, Nekrutenko A, Taylor J. Galaxy: a web-based genome analysis tool for experimentalists. Curr Protoc Mol Biol. 2010 Jan;Chapter 19:Unit 19.10.1-21.
  16. Miller W, Rosenbloom K, Hardison RC, Hou M, Taylor J, Raney B, Burhans R, King DC, Baertsch R, Blankenberg D, Kosakovsky Pond SL, Nekrutenko A, Giardine B, Harris RS, Tyekucheva S, Diekhans M, Pringle TH, Murphy WJ, Lesk A, Weinstock GM, Lindblad-Toh K, Gibbs RA, Lander ES, Siepel A, Haussler D, Kent WJ. 28-way vertebrate alignment and conservation track in the UCSC Genome Browser. Genome Res. 2007 Dec;17(12):1797-808.
  17. Taylor J, Schenck I, Blankenberg D, Nekrutenko A. Using galaxy to perform large-scale interactive data analyses. Curr Protoc Bioinformatics. 2007 Sep;Chapter 10:Unit 10.5.
  18. Sangar V, Blankenberg D, Altman N, Lesk AM. Quantitative sequence-function relationships in proteins based on gene ontology. BMC Bioinformatics. 2007 Aug 8;8:294.
  19. Blankenberg D, Taylor J, Schenck I, He J, Zhang Y, Ghent M, Veeraraghavan N, Albert I, Miller W, Makova KD, Hardison RC, Nekrutenko A. A framework for collaborative analysis of ENCODE data: making large-scale analyses biologistfriendly. Genome Res. 2007 Jun;17(6):960-4.
  20. Giardine B, Riemer C, Hardison RC, Burhans R, Elnitski L, Shah P, Zhang Y, Blankenberg D, Albert I, Taylor J, Miller W, Kent WJ, Nekrutenko A. Galaxy: a platform for interactive large-scale genome analysis. Genome Res. 2005 Oct;15(10):1451-5.

Careers

Careers

Training at Lerner Research Institute

Our education and training programs offer hands-on experience at one of the nationʼs top hospitals. Travel, publish in high impact journals and collaborate with investigators to solve real-world biomedical research questions.

Learn More

Research News

Research News

...
Researchers design new quantum error correction strategies

Cleveland Clinic investigators explore error correction methods for quantum computing results, building the infrastructure to address biomedical research questions.



...
How quantum computing will affect artificial intelligence applications in healthcare

Quantum computing can enhance AI to make groundbreaking discoveries.



...
Cleveland Clinic selected by Wellcome Leap for two quantum computing projects

Through the Discovery Accelerator partnership, IBM and Cleveland Clinic teams will collaborate closely on one project, and with Algorithmiq on a second project.



...
Galaxy Closes a Data Interoperability Loop

Aiming to reduce the barriers to data-driven research, Daniel Blankenberg, PhD, and colleagues developed in 2005 a web-based scientific analysis platform called the Galaxy Project.



Subscribe to get the latest research news in your inbox.

About Lerner

About Us Careers Contact Us Donate People Directory

Science

Clinical & Translational Research Core Services Departments, Centers & Programs Laboratories Research News

Education & Training

Graduate Programs Molecular Medicine PhD Program Postdoctoral Program RISE Program Undergraduate & High School Programs

Site Information & Policies

Search Site Site Map Privacy Policy Social Media Policy

9500 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44195 | © 2025 Lerner Research Institute