Editing BioMicroCenter:News2011 (section)

=== September 16, 2011 ===

Dear users,

I hope everyone had a great summer. I have a few updates for on recent changes in the BioMicro Center.

First, we will be running the Technology Seminar Series again this year. This seminar series is designed to showcase a different technology in the facility each month and to bring you up to date on the latest advances and future directions of the technology in the BioMicro Center. The seminar is on Tuesdays at noon in 68-181 and lunch will be provided.  We have asked the companies we have invited to bring their scientists to speak (not the sales team) so you have a chance to interact with them directly. The first session will be in just under two weeks with Tecan presenting on the robotics systems we have in the core. The full schedule is being maintained on our website at http://openwetware.org/wiki/BioMicroCenter:Technology_Seminar_Series.

Second, we are just rolling out our newest service: Automated chromatin IP. Over the past few months we have been evaluating the IP-Star technology from Diagenode. We’ve had enough success that the instrument has been purchased and we are now offering ChIP services. The IP-star takes as input sonicated crosslinked chromatin from ~5 million cells and antibody, and ends with purified DNA. The DNA can be used for either gene specific analysis or can be carried directly in to Illumina library preparation and ChIP-seq. We have validated one set of buffer conditions that have worked robustly but the system is capable of handling a broad range of alternative conditions and can even be used to test several conditions simultaneously. I do want to point out that this is still an experimental technology and remains sensitive to most of the complexities of ChIP (requiring good antibodies and chromatin preparations) so our “guarantee” of success is much more limited than most of our other technologies, but we have seen some very promising results from our early adopters.

Finally, for those of you following the Agilent BioAnalyzer saga, we’re hoping we are at the end of it now and that the high sensitivity DNA chips are back on line. We’re still cleaning up our backlog so sample processing remains slower than we would like but I’m hoping within a week we’ll be back to normal. I do want to thank the technicians in the lab who have been working extra hours on an extremely frustrating problem to get the issue resolved. 

As always, this newsletter is only sent to people who have used the BioMicro Center within the past couple years, so feel free to forward this on to anyone else who might be interested. 

Best regards,
-Stuart Levine