Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN) is the world's most widely read biotech publication. It provides the R&D; community with critical information on the tools, technologies, and trends that drive the biotech industry.
Issue link: http://gen.epubxp.com/i/155541
OMICS Next-Gen Sequencing perhaps for legal reasons. At the least we can provide a common area for them to come and say 'I'm working on this project and I am going to need 5,000 more genomes to get enough power to validate this fnding, does anybody else have those? Do I have to fnd 50,000 more subjects and sequence them, or does somebody have these that match these criteria already?'" Dr. Bloom continued. "We want to be able to answer that question for them." "Think of this effort as a community cloud but it's not a public cloud so we can provide all the security and HIPAA compliance and the IRB and informed consent kind of security and privacy restrictions you need in a medical setting," she added. "We are in the process of becoming CLIA certifed. Not all of the work—sequencing, et cetera— needs to be CLIA, but things that are being used in patient care must be validated in a CLIA lab." Already Delivering Surprises Speaker David Galas, Ph.D., principal scientist, Pacifc Northwest Diabetes Research Institute (PNDRI), discussed work in which he and his colleagues discovered exogenous RNA in plasma. "Many times in science you stumble The surprise is there is a lot of foreign RNA in our systems. The puzzles are how does it get there, what influence does it have, and does it have an impact on our health. Continued from page 27 across something unexpected," said Dr. Galas. "Using next-gen sequencing, we were trying to identify what RNAs were in plasma, principally looking for endogenous RNA. We had no real suspicions of other things there. We rapidly discovered there were all these sequence reads that couldn't be mapped to the human genome." He and his colleagues reported these results in a 2012 PLOS One paper. "Surveying human plasma for microRNA biomarkers using next-generation sequencing technology, we observed that a signifcant fraction of the circulating RNA appear to originate from exogenous species," the researchers wrote. "With careful analysis of sequence error statistics and other controls, we demonstrated that there is a wide range of RNA from many different organisms, including bacteria and fungi as well as from other species." They noted that some of these RNAs may be associated with proteins, lipids, or other molecules protecting them from RNAse in plasma. Of these, some were detected in intracellular complexes that could infuence cellular activities in vitro. "These fndings raise the possibility that plasma RNAs of exogenous origin may serve as signaling molecules mediating, for example, the humanmicrobiome interaction and may affect and/ or indicate the state of human health," the researchers wrote. Commenting further on this work, Dr. Galas said: "The surprise is there is a lot of foreign RNA in our systems. The puzzles are how does it get there, what infuence does it have, and does it have an impact on our health." Given the powerful effects of circulating human microRNAs, Dr. Galas suspects foreign RNAs also produce effects. "I think this is a whole new feld that's been opened by the next-gen sequencing technologies," he said. "There's really no other way to do it." Easily manage your instrument use and care online Sign into your account on lifetechnologies.com* to: Access instrument service history Request service and get quotes Track warranty and contract status Check availability and schedule instrument use Discover many more benefts No cost. No hassle. No worries. Learn more at lifetechnologies.com/ISPortal The New York Genome Center provides both computational work and data storage for collaborating institutions and commercial organizations. Rita Rose Photography *At this time, instrument use and care information is available in the United States, Canada, and most countries in Europe. ©2013 Life Technologies Corporation. All rights reserved. CO06180 0613 Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | GENengnews.com | September 1, 2013 | 29