| The Technology Development group has been a part of the GSC for the past 12 years since it became an NIH-funded center. This group was originally composed of engineering and technical staff in an effort to encourage interdisciplinary interactions that would significantly impact our production sequencing throughput, efficiency and cost. Although these interdisciplinary components remain in our Technology Development group to this day, we have expanded our purview to include two additional groups: Testing and Training and Facilities and Instrumentation groups. The Testing and Training group functions to test and transition protocols into the recipient groups such as production, pre-finishing and finishing, as well as Mutational Profiling. Overall, our Technology Development goals still remain as they were originally envisioned in that we aim to reduce costs and make processes more efficient, while maintaining or improving data quality. In order to accomplish these goals, we are constantly aware of and communicating with outside groups including other academic labs and commercial entities. The diverse nature of our expertise reflects the reality that achieving our goals typically requires us to make automated equipment work with molecular biology protocols, and that we must often step outside of the envisioned use of an instrument to make significant progress. To-date, we have been successful on a yearly basis of lowering costs, improving throughput without significant increases in production personnel, and maintaining or improving the quality of our production sequencing data. More recently, we have begun to act as a liaison between our production and informatics groups, in the realm of testing and training on informatics tools for interacting with the Oracle database. - Template preparation development.
- Automation for prefinishing reaction pipetting.
- Optimization of the 3730xl DNA Sequencer.
- Procedures and automation development for mutational profiling work on human genomes.
- New technology investigations.
- cDNA cloning and sequencing development.
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