Besides providing grants, services, and instruments, we love to take part in on-going research projects.

If you are working on the development of a new technology, protocol or application, let us know. We can help you by:

• collaborating with you in any stage of its development
• serving as a beta test site

A few selected of our success stories:

• Development of a new search engine, MaXLinker. In this project, conducted in collaboration with Haiyuan Yu, professor of computational biology, the Proteomics Facility was selected as a pilot test site by Thermo Fisher Scientific. The aim of the project was to develop a new cross linking mass spectrometry (XL-MS) workflow to improve identification of protein-protein interactions in protein complex. The initial experimental design, workflow, and XL-MS datasets contributed by the facility led to the successful development of a novel search engine named “MaXLinker”. MaXLinker allows to identify proteome-wide cross-links by XL-MS with a lower false identification rate, and higher sensitivity and specificity than the latest search engine XlinkX 2.0 that is commercially available and widely-used for current XL-MS analysis.
  Yugandhar et al., Mol Cell Proteomics, 2020.

• Development of new protocols for genome-wide sequencing. The first protocol, PRO-seq, allows to map the location of active RNA polymerases, and transcription start sites. ChRO-seq allows to map the location of RNA polymerase for particularly difficult samples, either solid tissues or samples with degraded RNA. These projects were developed by John Lis, professor in the 

  Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Charles Danko, professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, and in collaboration with the Genomics Facility. The Genomics Facility provided sequencing services, expertise, and access to equipment to support this project. The Bioinformatics facility supports and manages much of the computational infrastructure used for data analysis.

  Chu et al., Nature Genetics, 2018 and Mahat et al. Nature Protocols, 2016.

• Identification of cell populations involved in muscle regeneration. The project was supported by the early adoption of single cell sequencing techniques, and substantial expertise in the Genomics facility for the design of Illumina sequencing adaptors, quality control, and quantification of the resulting libraries.
  De Micheli et al., Cell rep, 2020.