NGS Competence Center Tübingen (NCCT)

• Subject Area: General Genetics and Functional Genome Biology
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 407494995

With their strong focus on life sciences, the University of Tübingen and its partner institutions (Max Planck Institutes and German Centers for Health Research) have defined a strong need for next-generation sequencing (NGS) in biomedical research and clinical diagnostics early on. Tübingen has an ambitious research program that would be furthered by the availability of increased NGS capacity focusing on four areas: genomic health, understanding microbial communities, understanding model systems, and bioinformatics and data science. In all four research areas, Tübingen has excellent scientists and a high international visibility and will have an increasing demand of additional sequencing capacity. Its strength in bioinformatics and data science renders Tübingen unique within Germany. Over a dozen groups at the Center for Bioinformatics provide state-of-the-art algorithms for the analysis of high-throughput data. The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, the Department of Computer Science and the recently established Cyber Valley provide unparalleled expertise in machine learning that can be applied to large-scale sequencing data.Offering NGS technology to all scientists of the Tübingen Research Campus required the development of core service sequencing structures, data management and storage, and bioinformatics. All structures have been combined to form a comprehensive compact infrastructure: the Quantitative Biology Center (QBiC). QBiC not only integrates the NGS facilities (human genomics: c.ATG; Medical Microbiology: NGS-Microbial Genomics and Metagenomics [NGS-MGM]) but also combines them with other omics technologies (proteomics, metabolomics) and with a strong and comprehensive bioinformatics expertise. QBiC provides an established, scalable, and sustainable infrastructure that is perfectly suited for the service required for an NGS competence center. Through its integration in several national and international bioinformatics networks (e.g., de.NBI, ELIXIR-DE, GO FAIR) and an established IT infrastructure we can also ensure access to competent and scalable data storage, management and analysis expertise. NGS consulting, sequencing, data analysis and data integration into systemic scientific interrogations has already been offered for several hundreds of projects covering a large variety of taxa and of methodological sequencing approaches (RNAseq, targeted RNAseq, shRNAseq, ChIP-Seq, Methyl-Seq, mFAST-Seqs, exomes, genomes, shallow genomes, MIPs, panels, amplicon, 16S rDNA, shotgun metagenome). With the integrated NGS Competence Center Tübingen (NCCT) we aim to substantially increase multilevel data generation (genomes of all taxa, transcriptomics by RNAseq deep sequencing, epigenomics data) going hand in hand with proteomics and metabolomics data. QBiC will pioneer the concept of a Data Science Academy which will as well integrate national and international research networks as training of a new generation of data scientists.

• DFG Programme: Major Instrumentation Initiatives
• Major Instrumentation: High Throughput DNA Sequencer ; IT Infrastructure (Compute Cluster) ; IT Infrastructure (Data Storage) ; Laboratory Information Management System (IT) ; Long Read DNA Sequencer ; System for Sample Preparation (Automated Nucleic Acid Ectraction) ; System for Sample Preparation (Library Preparation System)
• Instrumentation Group: 1060 Dilutoren, Pipettiergeräte, Probennehmer ; 3150 DNA-Sequenzer ; 7031 Labor-EDV-Systeme ; 7070 Arbeitsplatzrechner, Personalcomputer ; 7100 Arbeitsspeicher, RAM
• Applicant Institution: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
• Leader: Professor Dr. Olaf Riess