Genomic Sciences Shared Resource

CORE 009 – GENOMIC SCIENCES SHARED RESOURCE PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The mission of the Genomic Sciences Shared Resource (GSSR) is to bring new and powerful genomics approaches to the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) research community, inclusive of our VICC members and partners at Meharry Medical College, Tennessee State University, and other NCI centers. The vision of the GSSR is to rapidly translate the most powerful modern and enabling genomics technologies to practice and make these accessible to investigators. The GSSR seeks to maximize responsiveness to unmet scientific needs and partner with VICC investigators to develop and operationalize new processes, platforms, applications, assays and dry lab pipelines. To support investigators with their important work, the GSSR offers high level scientific concierge support. This includes advice on appropriate technology, sample collection, processing and extraction, biobanking and storage, and quality assessment. The GSSR offers project management and study design to protect sample and data integrity, data management and analysis. The GSSR seeks continuous improvement in quality, cost, scalability, and turn-around time, as well as an increase in the range of assays/applications and sample types across both wet and dry laboratory phases. GSSR has found that the need for genomic data analysis is increasing rapidly for many VICC investigators. Thus, over the next iteration of the CCSG, the shared resource plans to increase bioinformatic support for users, including the processing of data to deliver intermediate results (i.e. count table for RNAseq, variant calls for DNAseq, etc.) as well as provide tools for analysis and visualization with ongoing high-level expertise provided in the GSSR. Importantly, the GSSR supports researchers in the design of rigorous experimental approaches that are transparent and reproducible. The GSSR accomplishes these goals through training, informal mentorship and service provided by the core. The GSSR staff are particularly well suited to facilitating good experimental design and validated methods, providing authentication services for key biological resources and in defining and establishing rigorous methods for acquiring and analyzing genomic datasets.