Abstract

Challenges and Opportunities in Automation for NGS Sample Preparation

Robin Coope, Group Leader and CoDirector, British Columbia Cancer Agency Genome Sciences Centre

The British Columbia Cancer Agency's Genome Sciences Centre has processed about 12,500 libraries in the last 12 months, and these range from large mRNA and miRNA research sample cohorts to clinical amplicons sets and whole genomes and transcriptomes for personalized onco-genomics. This has produced a range of challenges including the need to automate difficult processes such as poly-A capture and gel based size selection, the need to handle sample sets of variable size in the same pipeline, and the ever present need for robust, fast and actionable QC. This talk will describe several of these areas where what was thought to be easy turned out to hard, and highlight some of our novel solutions automation solutions.