Next generation sequencer

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In order to understand how things work, scientists often need to look inside cells or at samples of tissues, to see what is changing when there is disease, or poor nutrition, or injury, or in healing and repair. Traditionally, we have had to guess what might be changing, and to look for changes in one thing at a time. This held true for lots of different questions. If we wanted to look at differences in people's DNA, we could only look at one little bit at a time. But - there are often very many little tiny differences in DNA between people, and it would be much more useful to be able to get a bigger picture, or look at lots of pieces at once. If we wanted to look at changes in the amount and sort of different RNAs that are in cells (ie. the blueprint that cells use to make up their structure, and to do the work) - we also had to do this by looking at one thing at a time. This was slow, but it also meant that we could miss a very important change, because we didn't know it was changing. If we wanted to look at how cells turn on their DNA to make things happen, we also had to test this one gene at a time. However, a new platform for rapidly analyzing all of these things is now available, called Next Generation (Next Gen) sequencing. Being able to see all of the things that are changing will help us to get a much bigger picture than before. This equipment will help lots of different researchers at the University of Waterloo, in different ways. Some of these people are studying how the brain works, from molecules to cells to the whole brain's ability to do electrical signaling. Others are studying what happens in people who are aging or have cancer. Some are trying to understand developmental problems in eyesight in kids. Others are interested in how changes during pregnancy affect offspring later on. Access to this powerful resource will help us to keep Canadian research at the leading edge, by taking us in directions that we could not previously have envisioned.