Editing BioMicroCenter:News2012 (section)

== JUNE 5, 2012 ==
A couple major Illumina announcements to begin with. First, thanks to the generosity of Dr. Chris Love, the BioMicro Center now has an Illumina MiSeq available. The MiSeq is Illumina’s newest sequencer and is optimized for speed and long read lengths. The MiSeq flowcell contains a single lane with 5 million clusters. While this is well below the 200m reads per lane on the HiSeq, the small surface area enables it to run much faster with a cycle taking only 5 minutes. This means that a 150+150 paired end run can be done in a little over a day, instead of requiring two weeks or more of sequencing. The MiSeq is ideal for applications that do not require enormous read depth, such as microRNA analysis, resequencing of small genomes, barcode sequencing or sequencing amplicons. There are a number of caveats about the MiSeq that can impact your experiment, most notably that there is no separate control lane which means you need to be more careful about base balance, and we are happy to talk with you more about it.<BR><BR>

The second announcement is about our venerable GAIIs. As some of you may have noticed, submitting samples for the GAII has been an exercise in extreme patience as we have struggled to fill flowcells due to low demand. The addition of the MiSeq, and some fantastic efforts by Michael Gravina in the lab, has enabled us to rework how we are processing GAII flowcells. We have been able to create partial flowcells on the GAII by altering recipes and making a few minor “modifications”. This has allowed us to move from a model like the HiSeq, where we need a full flowcell before we run, to a model where we can run as soon as the samples pass quality control, more like the MiSeq. However, unlike the MiSeq, we can run multiple lanes at once. Also, running partial flowcells means we can skip parts of the imaging time which does speed up the sequencing (though not to the level of the MiSeq). Some critical caveats: First, these methods are not supported by Illumina, so we cannot offer to replace failed runs. Second, unlike the HiSeq, the PhiX lane is *not* included. You must choose to sequence a lane of PhiX if you want to do control normalization. Finally, this service is completely "a la carte" so the pricing schema is quite different. To go along with these changes, [[BioMicroCenter:Sequencing|we have completely reworked the Illumina page on our website]], so take a look there for more information about the MiSeq, the new GAII methods and pricing.<BR><BR>
A couple quick final announcements:
* Pricing for the next fiscal year is now on the [[BioMicroCenter:PricingFY2013|Website]]. Prices have generally moved lower, though there are slightly higher prices in a few areas.
* The BioMicro Center will be running on a skeleton staff the week of June 11th (the week of the Building 68 retreat and the KI symposium). There will be some staff on hand but our throughput will be significantly lower than normal. 
* Finally, last month we said goodbye to Barbara Karamapalas who has been running our automation efforts. Stuart Levine will be handling the Tecans while we are looking for a replacement. We will also be having more turnover in the next couple months as well. Our current co-op, Linda Nguyen, will be leaving at the end of June to return to Northeastern and Kevin Thai will be stepping down in July to take a little bit of time off before he returns to MIT as a graduate student. We wish them all the best of luck and we’re looking very aggressively for their replacements!