Facilities

CORE FACILITY

Institute of Genomics Core Facility is dedicated to providing genotyping and sequencing services to researchers, clinicians and others with the state-of-the-art technology of Illumina. The equipment of the Core Facility has financed from different European funding instruments like FP7 grant and EU structural Fund grants. Today, the core facility is equipped with Illumina’s HiSeq2500, MiSeq and NextSeq500 for wholegenome and targeted sequencing projects, and a iScan for genome-wide genotyping and methylation analyses, supported by relevant robotics and experienced staff. The Genotyping and Sequencing Core laboratory of GI is Illumina certified service provider (CSPro) for sequencing, gene expression and genotyping (HiSeq2500, MiSeq, HiScan, ABI7900HT, STARLet pipetting). For the exact list of services please see here!

ESTONIAN BIOBANK

The Institute of Genomics manages the Estonian Biobank which is a population-based biobank, created with the aim to promote the development of human genetic research, collect information on health issues and genetics of the Estonian population, and implement genomics data into medical practice. The Biobank is conducted according to the Estonian Gene Research Act and all participants have signed a broad informed consent form. The Estonian Biobank currently consists of samples from over 152,000 participants (≥18 years of age), thus representing 15% of the Estonian population and will be further expanded by 50,000 participants in 2019..The entire biobank cohort will be genotyped using genome-wide (Illumina) arrays. All data base subjects are volunteers and were recruited randomly by the general practitioners and physicians at the hospitals. This ensures that all health states and diseases of the country are represented without collector’s bias or bias toward specific conditions. The IG has technology and experience to link its own database with the national electronic databases to constantly update the phenotype information for the subjects. This linking is being done on a regular basis for eight databases. For more information, please visit www.biobank.ee

EVOLUTIONARY-BASED BIOBANK

The Evolutionary Biology research group of the Institute of Genomics houses a sizable sample bank covering over 25,000 human DNA samples from hundreds of populations from Eurasia and beyond. This has been possible through building partnerships with many (molecular-) anthropology labs all around the world. The bulk of the samples have been analysed for mtDNA and Y chromosome variation. Close to 4,000 well-chosen samples have been subject to genome wide SNP-chip analysis and close to 400 samples have been subject to complete genome sequencing.

OTHER

We have full access to Tartu University’s High-Performance Computing Center (HPC) computational cluster. The HPC offers infrastructure for interactive and batch-based computing jobs, Openstack based cloud infrastructure for running virtual machines and Docker containers. We have more than 3PB of disk storage capacity and nearly unlimited mid-term storage capabilities using tapes. There are three separate cluster systems available. The main one features almost 3000 computational cores (2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2660 v2 @ 2.20GHz). All machines are connected to a fast Infiniband 4X QDR fabric, powered by 8 Mellanox switches. The system is running CentOS 7.4. Computations are submitted using SLURM.