Editing BioMicroCenter:News2013 (section)

=== JUNE 17, 2013 ===

First, we have a number of [[BioMicroCenter:People staffing changes]] to tell you about. The end of June will see three members of the core moving on. Ryan Abo, one of our informatics scientists, will be heading to the Dana Farber and Paraj Patel and Pierrick Millet will be returning to Northeastern. Our new co-op students, Ashley Machado and Alexander Soltoff will be starting July 1st. We are currently undertaking a job search to look for Ryan’s replacement. If you have any concerns about the personnel changes, please feel free to contact me. <BR><BR>

In a piece of good news, the root cause of the critical failures we have had with our MiSeq for the last month plus with homopolymer samples appear to have been identified and should be fixed today. A recent software upgrade that was supposed to improve the handling of homopolymeric samples apparently failed to install properly, resulting in a mix of pipeline versions that was unable to handle the sequences at all. I do want to thank everyone for their patience as we have struggled with this problem and assure everyone we will move through our backlog on the MiSeq as fast as we possibly can. I also want to thank the techs in the lab, especially Scott Morin, who have been working weekends to try to get as many samples through the MiSeq as possible. <BR><BR>

Finally, with the end of the fiscal year, our annual price adjustments are due to take effect on July 1st. You can find a complete list of the [[BioMicroCenter:PricingFY2014|new prices here]] . The largest change is a reduction in cost for HiSeq sequencing, especially for longer reads. This is associated with a significant decrease in the amount of time we will be holding data on our servers and with the recent switch from fastq + SAM file formats to retaining only BAM files. (see January 2013 notes).