Automated DNA Sequencing Core Facility

Salser, Winston

Abstract

The UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center (JCCC) DNA Sequenator Core Facility initiated operations in 1988. Its goal is to provide automated sequencing technology to produce the highest quality sequences in the most cost-effective manner. In a 1987 survey more than 60 UCLA laboratories indicated that they not only used DNA sequencing techniques but felt that the rapid advances in automated DNA sequencing should be developed at UCLA within the Core Facility framework so that, as the technology became appropriate for a greater and greater variety of projects, these techniques would be immediately available to all laboratories with corresponding needs. The number of UCLA laboratories using DNA sequencing techniques or planning to use them in the near future has grown to an estimated 100 at the present time, of which 42 have already used the Core Facility and 89 are participants in this grant because the added capabilities will be important to their research. The creation of this Core Facility has been strongly supported by the Dean of the UCLA School of Medicine and the Dean of Life Sciences, who provided approximately $140,000 in start-up funds in 1988. Additional secure funding, currently $43,418 per year, is available through 1993 from a Cancer Center Core Support Grant. This strong initial support enabled the Core Facility to set records for high accuracy automated sequencing of single strand templates to and beyond 500 nucleotides within three months of receiving the automated sequencing machine in 1988. It must be acknowledged that this is currently a paradoxical field. Even the university laboratory most responsible for developing automated sequencing techniques is currently said to use manual sequencing for most of its research. At UCLA there are many laboratories who could not benefit from the 1st generation automated sequencing equipment but who feel that the 2nd generation equipment requested here overcomes these earlier limitations and will greatly facilitate their work. UCLA's Core Facility has become especially helpful to the great number of laboratories that rely on sequencing but cannot make it the major focus of their research effort. For these laboratories even the first generation equipment drastically cuts costs and gives very high quality sequence. UCLA's Core Facility is widely known for its success in creating an operation which services a large numbers of individual laboratories; for success in areas such as automated sequencing of duplex (supercoiled) templates, which has proved difficult for many; and for achieving a very efficient operation with one of the lowest recharge rates in the world. Several items of the requested equipment are essential to enable the Core Facility to process the expanding volume of samples supplied by the Core Facility users. Also, the superior data analysis possible with the Fast Data Finder will greatly reduce the enormously time-consuming and mind-numbing aspects of data overlap and editing required to produce accurate finished sequences. Without the Fast Data Finder, such analysis is more time consuming than producing the data.