Current Sequencing Fleet

QCMG has engaged Life Technologies as the principal provider of Next Generation sequencing (NGS) technology because of their vast experience in the industry and the relationship that was established when the first SOLiD platform was installed in the laboratory in late 2007. Currently the QCMG houses a fleet of 11 SOLiD V4 Genome Sequencers which are primarily used for whole genome sequencing, Exome sequencing and RNA-Seq (mRNA and miRNA), each SOLiD V4 can produce 90 Gbs every two weeks.

New Sequencing Platform

The compliment of SOLiD V4 sequencers has recently been expanded to include Life Technologies latest NGS platform the 5500xL, the first in the Asia Pacific region. This latest iteration of the SOLiD Sequencing family of Next Generation Sequencers, developed in collaboration with Hitachi, expands the capacity and capabilities of the sequencing core through increased throughput and added customization, including the ability to run different sequencing experiment concurrently on a single flow chip. QCMG plans to continue whole genome sequencing and Exome sequencing on this platform as well as RNA-Seq (mRNA).

Non Optical Sequencing Instruments

Independently QCMG received a suite of Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machines (PGM) at the beginning of 2011. This new non-optical sequencing platform has primarily been used for Amplicon sequencing of candidate genes that have shown somatic variations when sequenced on the SOLiD V4 platform. QCMG have also used this instrument for bacterial sequencing and initial trials have been performed with miRNA experiments. The arrival of the next iterations of sequencing chips will allow us to scale whole genome bacterial sequencing, increase the throughput of the Amplicon validation pipeline and also begin to explore the possibilities of this platform with the RNA-Seq pipelines (primarily miRNA)

The implementation of the Ion Torrent PGMs has generated new opportunities by leveraging the speed and scalability of the platform, allowing further expansion and extended capabilities of the sequencing core.

Automation

In parallel to the expansion of the sequencing fleet, QCMG has begun implementation of robotic platforms to work in unity with the Next Generation Sequencing technologies, allowing QCMG to scale accordingly with the increased throughput. This new section of the QCMG laboratory houses two Agilent Bravo Liquid Handlers and three complete EZ-Bead Systems from Applied Biosystems. Simultaneously evaluations have been initiated with two Library generation platforms, the Beckman SPRI-TE and the Life Technologies Library Builder. This compliment of robotic platforms is currently allowing QCMG to generate over 50 Fragment libraries per day, and process greater than 96 Exome samples per week.