Editing BioMicroCenter:News2013 (section)

=== SEPTEMBER 12, 2013 ===

I hope everyone had a great summer. A couple new things to tell you about with the start of the academic year. First, we have two new bioinformatics scientists on board. [[BioMicroCenter:BioInformaticsStaff|Dr. Duan Ma]] comes to us from the Dept of Biostatistics at Washington University as well as several years in industry where she worked on a broad variety of bioinformatics problems as well as cloud computing solutions. [[BioMicroCenter:BioInformaticsStaff|Dr. Jie Wu]] did his PhD in computational biology Cold Spring Harbor where he focused on developing algorithms for RNAseq. Both Jie and Duan are located in [http://whreis.mit.edu 68-317], so please stop by and say hello.<BR><BR>

One new product to tell you about is new [http://www.illumina.com/products/miseq-reagent-kit-v3.ilmn MiSeq v3 kits] which just came out. These kits increase read counts to 25m from the current 15m maximum. The kits only come in 150 and 600 nt sizes and are somewhat more expensive than the current reagents. The changes to the MiSeq do not help v2 kits and they cannot reach the 25m threshold. We will be offering both the v2 and v3 kits for a short while, but our expectation is the v2 kits will be discontinued by Illumina in the not so distant future. New pricing for the v3 kits is up on our [[BioMicroCenter:Pricing pricing site.]]<BR><BR>

Also on the sequencing front, we have some evidence that the CG bias issues we were seeing on the HiSeq may not have been totally resolved. We are in the middle of implementing some significant changes in our control lane chemistry in collaboration with Illumina. These will at least allow us to monitor the situation very aggressively and detect any changes in GC bias by using a more complex mixture of samples, instead of only phiX.  As I mentioned in our [[BioMicroCenter:News#APRIL_20.2C_2013|April newsletter]], if you have reason to believe your data was compromised by this issue, please come talk to us so we can help get replacement kits to get your samples rerun as soon as possible. The new control lane is in early beta but is being included on all HiSeq flowcells now. We do want to thank the Laub, Niles and Walker labs for DNA to help us in this effort.<BR><BR>

Finally, the [[BioMicroCenter:Technology_Seminar_Series|Technology Seminar Series]] will return this year. We begin next Wednesday with Wafergen talking about the Smartchip system. The seminar will be at noon in 68-180 and lunch will be provided. We’re hoping to have seminars every month throughout the year so be sure to look for them on our website.