The Genome Analysis Centre has been established to exploit the very high throughput sequencing
that is now possible of DNA, to analyse both the structures of genomes and how they are
used.
So, we're interested in their function and that is combined with bioinformatics, both
computing capacity and a large team of skilled people.
The Genome Analysis Centre is one of the most advanced centres in the world with respect
to the types of equipment that we're using.
We have a good range of different DNA sequencing technologies so that we can mix and match
them for our purposes.
This is our equipment room where we keep all of our sequencers.
It is very noisy in here because we have to have a lot of air conditioning.
The machines produce a lot of heat, they all have their own fans, and we have to pump the
heat away.
This is a MiSeq.
This is one of my favourite machines.
It's an Illumina machine.
We have a lot of larger Illumina machines, but the advantage of this one, although it
gives us less data, it actually gives us the data much more quickly and because I work
in sequencing technology development, this allows me to do experiments and get the answers
quickly and then move onto doing the next experiment having based that on the answers
that I get.
And it uses a very small flow cells and has a simple cartridge system that basically has
everything that these two things just plug in, and we can give it the samples.
And the advantage of this is that instead of taking ten, eleven days to give us a result,
we can get a result within a single day.
The high throughput DNA sequencing capacity and the high capacity of computing that TGAC
has are a national capability and that means that we are a unique resource for the bioscience
community within the UK.
This is the Pacific Biosciences RS.
This is one of our most recent machines.
It is a very loud machine.
Most of our machines are quite loud because we have to control very carefully the climate
conditions inside them.
The advantage of this machine, which is quite large, is that it actually gives us very,
very long reads.
Inside here we get very small chips, like this one, which this single chip has 150,000
miniscule little wells which are only nanometres across and each of those wells holds a single
piece of DNA and a single enzyme.
And using the lasers and specialised optics in this machine, we can actually look at each
piece of DNA being sequenced in real time.
So we can see the different nucleotides being added by the polymerase because each of the
nucleotides have a different dye attached to it.
And that is happening as we actually look at the screen, we can see them coming up.
It is very interesting technology for us because it allows us to sequence thousands, maybe
even tens of thousands of bases from a single piece of DNA, which is much longer than what
we can get with other technologies.
The other thing that it allows us to do is to look at the native DNA, there is no arification
involved, it is directly the DNA that comes from the organism that we're sequencing.
So, we can actually look at slight modifications on the DNA, which is a field called epigenetics,
so we can look at things like just little methyl groups, CH3, which is attached to particular
nucleotides.
And those are very important in turning particular genes on and off.
And we can look at that natively using this platform.
The Genome Analysis Centre is special because the wide range of organisms that we're working
on and the different types of analysis that we're undertaking.
So very often we're asked to develop a strategy to solve a problem and to develop analysis
modules and tools that can be used for many other experiments in the future.
So one of the things that we're doing at the moment is working on the wheat genome.
The wheat genome is a very complex genome.
It's hexaploid and sequencing it is not straight forward.
So we're taking an approach where we are sequencing individual chromosomes and developing tools
to compare and contrast the sequences that we can generate from each of the individual
chromosomes.
This is a biochip that allows us to look at the quality of the nucleic acids that are
being sent in by our collaborators.
So we only need to put one or two microlitres of sample in here but that allows us to look
at incredible detail at both the size and the quantity of the amount of material that
they're sending us and whether it is useful and appropriate to make a whole library out
of it.
So we can just put one or two microlitres in here, and this does eleven different samples,
and load it into our bioanalyser and run it.
And within a few minutes we'll get the results.
Over two thirds of the people in The Genome Analysis Centre are involved in bioinformatics
analysis.
So that's taking the sequence data that we generate, processing it, managing it, and
then undertaking different types of analysis.
So we have the BBSRC high-strategic aims of food security, bioenergy, and healthy living.
And the work that TGAC does actually spans all of those areas and increasingly we're
looking at how we can use informatics as a focus for developing new models that can be
applied in these different areas of focus.