Each lab in Life Sciences may designate one member to become a “power user” of the Sequencing Facility.  Power users are trained by our staff to independently run their plates on our sequencers.  For information about our instruments, please see Equipment.

To schedule a training session, please contact Christian Daly (cdaly@cgr.harvard.edu).  We charge a training fee of $220 per session.  We will ask you for a 33-digit code that will be used to charge both the training fee and your subsequent usage fees (two different codes may be used).  Please ask your PI or lab administrator for the appropriate code.

Once trained, power users are given an account that allows them to reserve time on the instruments and log in to the computers that control them. To access the web signup page to reserve time, click here (click here to access this page from a computer outside the MCB/CGR subnet). The first time you log in to the web sign up page, you will be asked to create a Sequencing Account that will link you to your lab’s account codes. To add new account codes to for your lab, please email Jennifer Xie.

We allow reservations in one-hour time blocks. A typical run takes two hours, but longer runs may take up to four. You must also record how many samples you will run during your scheduled time so that we can correctly charge your account. You must run full plates on the 3730xl instruments, but you may run partial plates in multiples of 16 samples on the 3130xl instruments. You may cancel a reservation up to two hours before the scheduled start time. After that, the scheduled run will be charged to your account.

We charge a fee to recover the cost of reagents and instrument maintenance. The cost is $93 per plate on the 3730xl or $15.50 per 16-sample slot on the 3130xl.

Once your samples have run, please come back to retrieve your data. You may transfer your data using our temporary server space on \\titan\data or with a USB key. To save to \\titan\data, go to Start, Run, and type \\titan\data. You may create a new folder for yourself if you don’t already have one. Copy your data into this folder. You may save up to 2.5G of data for up to 30 days. Data older than 30 days is automatically deleted. To retrieve your data, point your web browser to ftp://www.cgr.harvard.edu/data. Scroll for your folder. Drag your files from this folder to your local computer (it’s wise also to make a backup onto other media). Once you have confirmed the successful transfer of your data, please delete the original off the hard drive. Any data on the instrument computer older than one week is subject to deletion without warning.

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