Facilities and equipment

The Centre was located in the former Andalusian Centre of Human Genome Sequencing, located in the Technology Park Cartuja 92 in Seville, occuping an area of over 1,000 square meters divided into seven laboratories and common research and administration areas.

One wing of the Centre wasdedicated to Functional Genomics and wasdivided into the various laboratories associated with specific stages of the sequencing process: Library Preparation Room, Capture Room, Emulsion PCR Room, Emulsion Breaking Room, Sample Preparation Room, and Sequencing Room. Each Room wasequipped with specific equipment for each stage of the process.

The Centre also had a general Molecular Biology laboratory of over 200 m2.

The Centre had state of the art scientific equipment and computers within its 3 main areas: the sequencing area, the bioinformatics area, and the functional genomics area.

This project has been co-funded in the framework of the Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica, 2008-2011, through the Subprogramas de Actuaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas en Parques Científicos y Tecnológicos, ACTEPARQ 2009 (PCT-300000-2009-012) and INNPLANTA 2010 (PCT-300000-2010-007) and the European Regional Development Fund.

SEQUENCING PLATFORM

The Medical Genome Project had 11 sequencers of two different technologies:

 7 Roche GS-FLX sequencers, with the following main features:

  • Automated sequencing of several DNA molecules in parallel
  • The sequencing accuracy is more than 99%
  • The duration of a run is 10 hours, allowing a run per day
  • Allows paired end sequencing of up to 150pb per end
  • Sequencing of 400-600 million bases per run
  • De novo sequencing of up to 3Gb
  • Sequencing in up to 16 different regions, so that several samples can be sequenced in the same Picotiter plate

4 Applied Biosystems SolidTM 4 sequencers, with the following main features:

  • Sequencing by synthesis, with double flow cell and double reading surface
  • Reads from both ends of the library without the need for extra equipment
  • Ability to obtain up to 100 Gb in a single run.
  • Versatile applications: sequencing of entire genomes, Re-sequencing of Target regions, gene expression, de novo methylation, metagenomics, ChIP-seq, and transcriptomes.
  • Possibility to choose the length of the sequences at one end of the libraries (Single Read) or at both ends of the libraries, whether they consist of short fragments (Paired End) or long fragments (Mate Pair).
  • At least 50 samples can be sequenced simultaneously in one run.

 

BIOINFORMATICS PLATFORM

Bioinformatics platformAvailable computer equipment consisted of a high performance computing system with twenty nodes for processing the images generated by the sequencers. Each node had 72 GB of RAM DDR3, 2 Quad-Core processors at 2.66 GHz, 2 HP Flex-10 ports (10Gb/s), and is based on the Linux operating system (Suse).

This was a very high performance and high scalability parallel access storage cluster, with a gross capacity of 542 TB; it is based on the IBRIX system and was capable of serving data in different simultaneous protocols including IBRIX, NFS, and CIFS.

This computing infrastructure had to be housed in a specific high technology area, and therefore it has been housed in an external data centre, connected to the centre by optical fiber.