Don’t miss this great blog post from the Broad Institute (“A Sage partnership”) describing collaborative work between their genome sequencing team and Sage Science to design a better size selection process for the Broad’s sequencing pipeline.
Headed up by Sheila Fisher, assistant director of technology development for the Broad’s Genome Sequencing Platform, the goal was to replace error-prone, tedious manual gel extractions in the sample prep workflow. Working with Sage’s Pippin platform, Sheila and her team were able to automate the size selection step, improving accuracy and eliminating the chance for cross-sample contamination.
An added bonus was that Pippin sizing offered much higher yields than manual gel extraction had, allowing Fisher’s team to accept samples with just 100 nanograms of DNA, instead of the 3 or 4 micrograms the pipeline originally required. “This opened up a significant number of samples to the process that we couldn’t sequence before,” says Sheila in the blog post. “We were able to build a very strong partnership with Sage, and the result was a true co-development project.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. It’s truly a pleasure to continue with our great collaboration with the Broadies!