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Molecular Biology Facility Core

Significance and Description

Virtually all investigations into the mechanisms involved in environmental toxicology in general and carcinogenesis in particular have benefited from the tremendous progress that has been made in the molecular understanding of disease processes and environmental interactions, and in the availability of comprehensive genome-wide sequence data for an increasing number of species. As a result, most projects of investigators involve Molecular Biology at some level.

The overall goal of the Molecular Biology Facility Core is to provide investigators access to sophisticated and state-of-the-art molecular techniques. Because the Department of Molecular Carcinogenesis is multidisciplinary in nature, the level of support needed by different investigators varies widely. Consequently, the level of access offered by the Molecular Biology Facility Core varies from advice on specific aspects of projects, through training on particular instruments available in the Core, to complete molecular analyses from sample preparation to the final data analysis and interpretation.

The Molecular Biology Facility Core has traditionally provided services ranging from DNA isolation, PCR-based genotyping, manual and automated DNA sequencing, to mutation analysis. Currently, the services provided have been expanded significantly in three areas: protein expression analysis, RNA level gene expression analysis, and human SNP analysis.

Now Available Next Generation Sequencing Capabilities

In November 2011, Dr. JianJun Shen, Director of the Molecular Biology Facility Core, was awarded a CPRIT Core Facility Support grant for nearly $6M to establish a Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) facility at Science Park and to support its operation for 5 years. The construction of core facility has been completed and the equipment has been acquired. The instrumentation includes:

1) an Illumina HiSeq2000
2) an Illumina MiSeq
3) an Illumina cBot Cluster GenerationSystem
4) a primary computing server
5) a secondary smaller server
6) Illumina and open source software
7) a Covaris S220 for DNA shearing
8) a Beckman Coulter SPRI-TE: SPRIworks Fragment Library System I
9) an Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer

The NGS core is currently offering RNA-Seq services, and will be offering ChIP-Seq, exome resequencing, targeted resequencing, methylation sequencing and whole genome sequencing services shortly.

For the grant abstract visit the CPRIT site.
For more information on CPRIT awards to MD Andersonview the Press Release.

Staff

Jianjun Shen, Ph.D., Director