OUR SERVICES
All members of our BRC Genomics Facility are highy trained and experienced on NGS technologies and applications. We provide professional support to our internal and external users from experimental design and grant application stages to project timelines, costs and quotations.
Quality Control— The quality and quantity of your submitted DNA or RNA samples are initially checked at our facility and you will be contacted if there is any sample that appears below our expectations.
Library Preparation—Short fragment libraries that will be prepared from your samples, will be individually barcoded to be pooled if more than one sample is going to be sequenced in a signle run. These individual "barcode" sequences will help to identify each sample read during the final data analysis. We combine libraries so each indexed sample is present at equimolar concentration in the pool and to result in equal distribution of reads during sequencing. We offer library preparation for the following applications: Whole Genome Sequencing, Exome Sequencing, Targeted Resequencing, Transcriptome Sequencing, Pathogen Sequencing, Amplicon Sequencing and Single Cell Sequencing. We also have automated liquid handling instruments (Agilent Bravo and Mosquito) in place to help with some of the large scale projects and happy to discuss bespoke protocols.
Sequencing— For sequencing, amplified libraries are loaded into a sequencing glass flowcell where they are captured onto the surface-bound oligos complementary to the library adapters. Each bound library fragment is amplified into millions of clusters in a massively prallel process. The different output of each of our Illumina sequencing platforms (Hiseq4000 and Miseq), makes the Facility flexible to meet various projects with various throughput needs. The platform can deliver data output ranging from 300 kilobases up to multiple terabases in a single run, depending on platform and run type. The generated data then will be processed through a demultiplexing pipeline that will sort the reads into different files according to their individual barcode sequence. The raw data will be delivered in the FASTQ files format.
Data Analysis— Bioinformatics analysis can be offered upon a consultation. We have access to dedicated high-performance computing resources at the Imperial High-Performance Computing Service and Data Centre and maintain analysis pipelines for large-scale genomic datasets from a wide range of sequencing applications.
Our services are available to all users within the Imperial College London, universities within the UK and overseas, as well as commercial partners on a fee-for-service basis. Please contact us to discuss your requirements.
