Welcome to the Glasgow Polyomics Bulletin. This Newsletter is part of an on-going effort to maximise communication and updates coming from Glasgow Polyomics.

*** We welcome enquires via our website on potential collaborations, grants and projects. ***

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Glasgow Polyomics upgraded this year! We exchanged our NextSeq 500 for a NextSeq 2000, a top-of-the-line benchtop sequencing system. As with all new equipment we had some teething issues mainly due to reagent delays, but we worked closely with Illumina which meant that although some of our projects got delayed, we managed to generate high quality data for everyone. This year, we at genomics created over 2000 DNA and RNA libraries and ran over 3000 libraries on the MiSeq, NextSeq 500 and our new NextSeq 2000 combined.

Tandem Mass Tagging (TMT) is a state-of-the-art approach for obtaining comparative proteomics data in a multiplex analysis. We routinely offer 6plex and 10plex TMT analyses. This permits a pairwise analysis to be performed in triplicate in a single mass spectrometry run. We can also give access to a fully licensed version of ProteomeDiscoverer, a software suite that supports analysis and visualisation of TMT data.

The Scottish Metabolomics Network was held online this year, allowing for participation form attendees around the world. Polyomics were well represented at this with Gavin Blackburn discussing how fasted exercise affects your metabolism and what you can do to get the best out of small data sets, PhD student, Cameron Best, presented his work on metabolomics in rheumatoid arthritis patients. Joe Wandy presented his work with posters and Phil Whitfield was chairing one of the sessions! A well attended conference which will hopefully be back to an in person meeting next year in Aberdeen.

We were delighted to be awarded a Reinvigorating Research Award, in collaboration with Prof Sandosh Padmanabhan and Dr Kevin Bryson (CoSE). The project brings together computer scientists, data analysts and software developers with NHS clinicians at the QEUH to develop an analysis pipeline for transcriptomic data.

2021 has been a great year for our courses, and we plan to run multiple courses again in the new year! These will include An Introduction to Python for Biologists in March, and, An Introduction to Omics that we will first run in April. We also have a new course: An Introduction to Metabolomics Data Analysis which will be beneficial to anyone interested in Metabolomics and Lipidomics analyses.

Get in touch via our website to register your interest.