NCA21114 Tecan Freedom EVO

The Tecan Freedom EVO will allow accurate processing of the new generation arrays, these have smaller beads that allows higher genomic content and increased samples per bead chip. Improvements in the workflow decreases processing time from 3 days to 2 days therefore allowing higher throughput. Improvements in reagents give better signal to noise ratio and, importantly, removes the need for formamide so safer for technicians and the environment. Genotyping and methylation arrays continue to be a popular and economical method for genomic investigation with many thousands of samples ran each year.

The Genetics Core, Edinburgh Clinical Research Facility, has been running Illumina arrays since 2005. As a core facility it provides equitable access to researchers at all stages of their career on a simple cost-recovery model.

The Tecan Freedom EVO will be used to process the new arrays as released. The first two confirmed arrays are:

Global Clinical Research Array – a 24-sample bead chip with 1.3M markers

Global Screening Array (v4) – an updated version of the GSA v3 but allowing 48 samples to be processed, increased from 24, so allowing higher throughput and reduced processing costs.

This will support new and ongoing studies such as GenOMICC (Prof Baillie) where over 22k covid19 patient samples have been genotyped using the GSA (Nature 2021) and Generation Scotland (Prof Sudlow) as they collect and genotype a further 20k samples, as well as many small to medium sized projects across Edinburgh and the UK