Science /
Mike Heinz
"Nine times out of ten we end up going with Illumina because of the reproducibility, content, and price."
Mike Heinz
Group Leader at the Genome Technology Access Center Microarray Core Facility, Washington University School of Medicine
The Genome Technology Access Center (GTAC) at Washington University is a multifaceted facility providing RNA and DNA analysis to researchers both on and off campus. The core provides qPCR, next-gen sequencing, and microarray services. At the Microarray Core, Mike Heinz and his team offer a variety of microarray services for gene expression, genotyping, and other studies. From GoldenGate assays to the latest Infinium BeadChips, the microarray core offers off-the-shelf and customizable solutions for some of the world’s most discriminating researchers.
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Q&A with Mike Heinz
Why do you use Illumina?
Our relationship with Illumina goes all the way back to oligo library construction, well before BeadArrays. We’ve had a long relationship with Illumina and a good one. As a microarray core we’re skeptical about everything, and we had to be convinced. When we first got the BeadArray Reader five years ago, I thought: Are they really that good? We saw it with our own eyes right there in the training run: small sample size requirement and highly reproducible data. We’re often contacted by sales reps with new array products. We’ll do a comparison and see what you actually get out of one product versus another, and nine times out of ten we end up going with Illumina because of the reproducibility, content, and price.
How has Illumina improved your experience?
You guys actually listen. An example is making reagent boxes smaller. It seems almost trivial, but we have space limitations in an academic setting. Condensing the reagent footprint makes a big difference for conserving freezer and refrigerator space. Illumina has already been improving on these things that will make a real difference in the lab.
What is important to the researchers you support?
What’s most important is data quality. What’s the point in doing something if it’s not going to be high quality data? And whatever the application may be– if it’s gene expression, genotyping or CNV analysis- we know that we can trust that data. One of the biggest advantages that Illumina DNA analysis on bead chips has over anything else is the high throughput nature of the protocols. Even if our collaborators would rather wait for next array version (for example, the 2.5 million SNP array) but are concerned about the delay, we tell them, no problem, these are multiplex chips. We can still get the data to you faster on the Illumina platform than we can with other platforms.
Next to data quality, time savings for our collaborators, in a lot of cases, means cost savings. We’re a fee for service lab. When our technicians run 1,000 samples in the time it takes to run 100, the price per sample drops considerably. Lowered price allows less well-funded researchers to do a study they could not afford with other formats, and allows others to increase their sample sizes. When our researchers see how they can increase their sample size; you can actually see their excitement. It’s like “Wow, we can add 500 samples!"
Researcher Bio
The Genome Technology Access Center (GTAC) at Washington University is a multifaceted facility providing RNA and DNA analysis to researchers both on and off campus. The core provides qPCR, next-gen sequencing, and microarray services. At the Microarray Core, Mike Heinz and his team offer a variety of microarray services for gene expression, genotyping, and other studies. From GoldenGate assays to the latest Infinium BeadChips, the microarray core offers off-the-shelf and customizable solutions for some of the world’s most discriminating researchers.
