Minimizing Stress in Animal Studies Improves Data Quality
Speaker: Robyn McCain, BS, RLATG, Director of Purdue Translational Pharmacology
Purdue University
What is the one thing in life that completely affects us on multiple levels? It can affect us not only physiologically, but also mentally. This one thing also has the ability to be beneficial and detrimental. The answer is stress. By decreasing stress in our animal subjects during sampling we can produce higher quality data sets with fewer animals. The Purdue Translational Pharmacology (PTP) facility uses the Culex Automated Sampling System for rodents and swine to minimize pain and distress often caused by traditional sampling methods, which in turn produces quality data for our researchers. On top of reducing stress, the Culex automated sampling system can be used to collect multiple data sets from the same animal allowing you to reduce inter-animal variability in your studies. Please join us in finding out more about what the PTP can offer.
WideSeq, a service offered by the Purdue Genomics Core, spans the gap between small Sanger and large Illumina sequencing tasks. This allows, for example, sequencing of an entire plasmid construct at an affordable cost. Any double-stranded DNA template up to around 100 kb can generate useful results. Various use cases will be discussed. Sanger sequencing costs orders of magnitude more per base of sequence generated than Illumina Next Generation sequencing. But the costs of Illumina sequencing are in units of “runs”, rather than individual reads or bases. Even the smallest Illumina run generates vastly more sequence than is useful or cost-effective to deploy against a Sanger-level task. The Purdue Genomics Core gathers samples submitted to it, constructs Illumina libraries from them to be run on a MiSeq once per two weeks. Some informatics, like de novo assembly, are performed and the results returned as a web page.
