Editing BioMicroCenter:News2011 (section)

=== JULY 2, 2011 ===
Dear users,

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

First, by popular demand we are announcing that our RNA seq sample preparation service is officially accepting samples. This service requires 100ng of high quality eukaryotic RNA as input and is based on the Illumina TruSeq RNAseq kits coupled with the SPRIworks sample preparation robot. The initial price is $350/sample, which is a little more than then price of a microarray preparation. While the service is open, we are still in the tweaking stage and we are evaluating a number of different protocols that could reduce the total RNA amount or lower the quality of the RNA needed. We do hope to have these questions resolved in the very near future, but the quality of the data we have been getting has been sufficient that we wanted to open the service up to everyone.<BR><BR>

Second, prices for all of our services were updated on July 1st. Many prices are decreasing. A few key things to notice:
* Agilent microarray prices are dropping to be significantly lower than Affymentrix. A full experiment can cost $350/array. 
* HiSeq lane prices have decreased – particularly for paired end samples. GAII prices have also dropped a little. 
* Robotics usage prices are now set in two hour blocks instead of on a “per session” basis.
* Fluidigm usage prices will be rising to help defray repair costs.
The full list can be found '''[[BioMicroCenter:Pricing|on our pricing page]]<BR><BR>

Finally, this month we have a number of personnel changes. Katie Sullivan and Justin Elliot will be returning to Northeastern with our thanks for six months of hard work, and our new co-ops Jessica Lebowitz and Kaitlyn Sanders, will be starting on July 5th. Jessica and Kaitlyn will be taking over operation of the BioAnalyzer/LabChip and other sample quality control services. In addition, we will be adding a new bioinformaticist, Dr. Huming Ding, to the Center in early July. Dr. Ding comes to us from the University of Toronto where he worked extensively with Dr. Charlie Boone on high throughput screening of genetic interactions and will be helping us establish pipelines for analyzing Illumina data. Please say hello and make them feel welcome the next time you stop by!<BR><BR>
Best regards and have a happy Fourth of July!<BR>
-Stuart Levine