Center for Functional Genomics and Tissue Plasticity (ATLAS) has recently acquired an Illumina NovaSeq 6000 as part of the co-funding from University of Southern Denmark. The NovaSeq is the newest and most advanced high throughput DNA sequencer from Illumina, and the one at SDU is only the second of its kind in Denmark. It will be an important workhorse in ATLAS but will also be used by other research groups at SDU.
The overall aim of ATLAS is to determine how obesity alters properties of specific cell types in liver and fat tissues. By combining high throughput sequencing with different biochemical technologies, researchers in ATLAS will determine changes in gene expression as well as changes in the epigenomic programming of different cell types in the liver and adipose tissue in response to obesity. The high capacity of the new NovaSeq allows the researchers in ATLAS to study cellular gene expression thoroughly by sequencing RNA from hundreds of mouse or human samples in each run both faster and at lower costs than before. Furthermore, the scalability of the instrument gives an astonishing data output of up to 20 billion sequencing reads per run. This is at least a 10 fold upgrade compared to the Illumina HiSeq 1500 sequencing platform which is already an integrated part of the research unit.
The sequencer was installed at Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology early January, and the first data are already being analyzed.
Louise C. B. Elmelund-Præstekær,
Center Administrator at ATLAS, lcbe-p@bmb.sdu.dk, +45 93 50 74 63