Members

Head of Unit:

Heinz Himmelbauer (until March 2015), Jochen Hecht (since April 2015)

Laboratory Manager:

Anna Ferrer

Laboratory Technicians:

Anna Menoyo, Irene González, Magda Montfort, Maik Zehnsdorf, Maria Aguilar, Núria Andreu, Laura Vives (until July 2015)

Bioinformaticians:

Kathrin Meindl, Juliane Dohm (MPI Berlin, until March 2015), Philipp Peters (MPI Berlin, until March 2015)

Selected Publications

Patalano S, Vlasova A, Wyatt C, Ewels P, Camara F, Ferreira PG, Asher CL, Jurkowski TP, Segonds-Pichon A, Bachman M, González-Navarrete I, Minoche AE, Krueger F, Lowy E, Marcet-Houben M, Rodriguez-Ales JL, Nascimento FS, Balasubramanian S, Gabaldon T, Tarver JE, Andrews S, Himmelbauer H, Hughes WO, Guigó R, Reik W, Sumner S.
“Molecular signatures of plastic phenotypes in two eusocial insect species with simple societies.”
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 112(45):13970-5 (2015).

Minoche AE, Dohm JC, Schneider J, Holtgräwe D, Viehöver P, Montfort M, Sörensen TR, Weisshaar B, Himmelbauer H.
“Exploiting single-molecule transcript sequencing for eukaryotic gene prediction.”
Genome Biol, 16:184 (2015).

Summary

The Genomics Unit aims at providing excellent, state-of-the-art services for microarray technology and next-generation sequencing. In addition to providing service, the Unit is dedicated to test, implement, and to develop new protocols for various sequencing applications to advance the analysis of genes and genomes. The Unit is equipped with two Illumina HiSeq instruments, and also operates an Illumina MiSeq sequencer. The Unit has set up protocols for a broad range of applications like genomic sequencing, exome enrichment, amplicon sequencing, ChIP-Seq, and transcriptome characterization at the level of total RNA, small RNA, or mRNA. A focus of the Unit is the customization of library preparation protocols even for very small scale projects. One bottleneck for customization is frequently the lack of enzymes or specific formulations of these enzymes needed for the protocol. The Unit is working in close collaboration with the Biomolecular Screening and Protein Technologies Unit to set up in house production of these enzymes in order to facilitate customization of existing protocols and implementation of novel applications.

Research projects

Implementation of single cell RNA-seq protocols (Drop-seq; InDrop-seq).
Improvement of sequencing library preparation procedures for various applications.
In-house production and improvement of various enzymes for library preparation applications (together with the Biomolecular Screening and Protein Technologies Unit)