This story was originally published June 2
Life Technologies announced last week that it will collaborate with the German Cancer Research Center to create a new sequencing center.
The National High-Throughput Sequencing Center will be the largest sequencing center in Germany and will be partially funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
The center will be equipped with 10 SOLiD 4 systems, and its initial projects will include the sequencing of 1,000 whole human cancer genomes as Germany's contribution to the International Cancer Genome Consortium.
The center will carry out experiments involving not only whole-genome sequencing, but also transcriptome sequencing and copy number analyses, in order to get a comprehensive picture of the genetic nature of disease.
Life Technologies' president and COO Mark Stevenson said in a statement that the center "will be the first facility that will systematically bring high-throughput sequencing technology into systems biology applications on a large scale."
Roland Eils, head of the theoretical bioinformatics division at the German Cancer Research Center, said in a statement that the center's goal is to "understand the dynamic complexity of cellular processes on both the DNA and RNA level and how slight perturbations of those pathways contribute to the development of diseases like cancer,"