About us
The Imperial BRC Genomics Facility (IGF) was formed in 2014 through a merger of the "AHSC Clinical Genome Laboratory" and the "BRC Clinical Genome Informatics Facility", bringing together multidisciplinary expertise in genome sequencing and genomic data analysis. The facility is part of the Department of Medicine (Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism) and is funded by the NIHR through the Imperial Biomedical Research Centre. The mission of the Facility is to support the use of genome technologies and information to translate new genomic discoveries into medical advances.
Services provided
Range of services we provide:
Experimental design
Our team will support you in initial project consultation and design and try to extend their help with custom requirements. For information about how to initiate a project submission or further guidelines, please review our Project Submission Guideline page.
Quality control
A careful quality check will be performed on either the submitting DNA/RNA samples or on the sequencing libraries prepared by facility staff or users. This includes three major steps:
- Quantity Measurement (Qubit, Glowmax)
- Quality/size Measurement (Bioanalyzer, Tapestation)
- Molarity Measurement (RT-PCR)
Library preparation
The Facility only accepts purified nucleic acid for generation of sequencing libraries. We offer a broad range of library preparation options depending on the sample and application type and source. We individually barcode each prepared
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Library and equimolar concentrations of normalised libraries will be used for pooling as/if requested by the user. We offer library preparation for the following applications: Whole-Genome Sequencing, Exome Sequencing, Targeted Resequencing, Transcriptome Sequencing, Pathogen Sequencing, Amplicon Sequencing and Single-Cell Sequencing. For any different request, please get in touch and we might be able to collaborate on the project.
Sequencing
We provide comprehensive sequencing services using Illumina platforms (HiSeq4000and MiSeq) depending on the requested sequencing depth or the application. The raw data will be delivered in the FASTQ files format. We do not offer pooling of the libraries that have not been prepared within the Facility and the user should be able to provide pool(s) of barcoded libraries for a sequencing-only request.
Data analysis
Bioinformatics analysis can be offered upon a consultation. Our team of bioinformaticians can either provide you with the service needed for your project or advise you on access to the required tools for your data analysis.
The facility is equipped with the latest state-of-the-art equipment and sequencing platforms that offer the highest throughput and fastest turnaround times across multiple applications. Different output of each platform makes the Facility flexible to meet various projects with various throughput needs. We also have access to dedicated high-performance computing resources at the Imperial High-Performance Computing Service and Data Centre and maintain analysis pipelines for large-scale genomic datasets from a wide range of sequencing applications.