The TGen Integrated Microbiomics Center is an efficient, cutting-edge, multi-omic microbiome research and service center that will empower clinicians and researchers to integrate microbiome analysis into cancer-based research studies. The Center uses state-of-the-art sequencing technologies and bioinformatics tools and delivers custom, interactive microbiome summaries that are directly interpretable, and which can optionally be used with collaborator-preferred tools for further downstream analysis. Additionally, the Center includes a CLIA laboratory and integrates rigorous quality control that is often lacking in many microbiome services.
We provide comprehensive microbiome services, including:
- Custom end-to-end service, including consulting on study design, appropriate sample collection handling, and optimal analysis approaches
- Nucleic acid extraction
- Analysis-appropriate library preparation
- High-throughput sequencing
- Delivery of publication-quality bioinformatics analysis, statistics, and visualizations
- Post-analysis consult on interpretation and future studies
Our sequencing applications for microbiome analysis include:
- Standard 16S (bacterial) and ITS (fungal) gene sequencing
- Multiplexed targeted sequencing (e.g., specific toxin or drug resistance genes)
- Shallow and deep whole metagenome sequencing to understand full microbial gene composition
- Whole transcriptome sequencing to understand microbial and host transcription
- Microbial whole genome sequencing (for cultured microbes)
- Tiled genome sequencing for specific uncultured targeted microbes (e.g., select viruses)
The Center will assist with bioinformatics analysis and interpretation, including:
- Quality control and identification and removal of human genome contamination to protect your study participants’ identities.
- Identification and annotation of amplicon sequence variants and other microbiome features.
- Standard and customized microbiome analyses, including alpha and beta diversity analysis and visualization, differential abundance testing, longitudinal microbiome analysis, and more.
- Key data files will be provided, facilitating collaborator analysis with the QIIME 2 platform or other tools.
- Generation of interactive visualizations that can be explored in your web browser.
- Full annotation of all QIIME 2 analysis steps performed by our team, providing full transparency and enabling you to reproduce our workflow on the same or different microbiome data.
