Please include the following text in research proposals to describe the computational and sequencing resources available through the Institute for Systems Genomics (Last Update February 2026):
Center for Genome Innovation (CGI) is housed within the Institute for Systems Genomics on the University of Connecticut. The CGI, an open-plan laboratory, occupies 2000 ft2 in the recently constructed, state of the art Engineering and Science Building on the Storrs Campus. It has a staff of four sequencing/administrative staff, has established high throughput library preparation and sequencing capacity including all necessary ancillary equipment for the following sequencing platforms: Illumina NovaSeq 6000, MiSeq (x2), Illumina NextSeq 550 system (x1), Oxford Nanopore MinION (x7) and PromethION systems (x1), PacBio Sequel IIe and a PacBio Revio. Other (major) equipment available for use include the: Licor Odyssey FC imager, Beckman Allegra X-12R Refrigerated Centrifuge, Agilent Bioanalyzer 2100, Agilent TapeStation 2200, 4200 and Femto Pulse, Qubit 3.0, two PCR hoods, chemical and biosafety hoods, ABI SeqStudio DNA Analyzer, DigiLab Hydroshear, Diagenode Megaruptor, Covaris Cryoprep, Pippin Prep (including Pippin Prep, Blue Pippin and Pippin HT systems), a Covaris S2 and an S2 Genomics Singulator. Genomics projects are further enhanced by the 10x Chromium Genomics System for single cell applications like snRNA-Seq, ATAC-Seq and immunology profiling. Lastly, the CGI has a BioRad QX200 Droplet Digital PCR instrument which can be used for absolute copy number, mutation and gene expression detection.
On-site training and outreach at UConn can be performed in the training facility in the Institute of Systems Genomics space. This space, within the Center for Genome Innovation, includes a training laboratory for molecular work, two working classrooms equipped for distance and in person learning, a computational training space, all located on the same floor (3rd). In addition, we have a large, multi-format lobby and auditorium space with moveable tables, projection and both large and small format interactive space that seats 80 people. Moreover, a historical display of the evolution of sequencing technologies is in the CGI lobby, offering an outreach launch point for discussion of genomic technologies and advances.
The Computational Biology Core (CBC) is housed within the Institute for Systems Genomics at the University of Connecticut. The CBC has a staff of three full time bioinformaticians that provide training and consultation services to the research community at all of the UConn campuses. High Performance Computing (HPC) resources, including the Xanadu and Mantis clusters, are housed in a secure data center at the Cell and Genome Sciences Building on the UCHC Farmington campus. All servers are freely available to members of the UConn research and their research affiliates. The compute clusters are comprised of 75 compute nodes with over 10,000 CPU cores, 105 TB of RAM, and capable of processing at 300 TFLOPs. The nodes are a mix of Dell C6145 chassis with four 12-core AMD Opteron processors and Dell R730 chassis with two, 18-core Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 processors. Node memory ranges from 256 GB to 2 TB of RAM. Additional resources include 2688 NVIDIA M2075 GPU cores. All nodes are equipped with ten-gigabit interfaces and connected to a 10/40/100 gigabit network infrastructure. Isilon and Qumulo Network Attached Storage systems are provided with a capacity of 15 petabytes. An additional 3.8 petabytes of geo-spread object storage is provided via an Avere gateway with 30 gigabit-per-second aggregate throughput.
All clusters allow access to over 400 bioinformatic modularized and/or containerized applications. These applications support analysis in phylogenetics, metagenomics, genome assembly, transcriptome assembly, sequence alignment, sequence annotation, variant detection, Chip-Seq, proteomics, and a variety of visualization tools.