This last week was extremely exciting for the laboratory. We kicked off our Next Generation Sequencing validation featuring the Verogen MiSeq FGX. On Tuesday, we welcomed Dr. Anna McMullin (second from the left) to our laboratory. She is a Field Application Scientist at Verogen and was, thankfully, selected to be our trainer to start the process of validating, implementing, training and gaining competency for the instrument and it's chemistry.
We originally planned this to begin in January, but 2020 would have none of our silly little plans and between some issues that Verogen had, COVID-19, travel safety and well, the world aligning against us a little bit (just kidding), we had to put our plans off until June. Sometimes patience is rewarded and we believe this is one of those instances!
The training went very well and we cannot tell you how excited we are to implement this. It is truly a GAME CHANGING technology for the Forensic DNA community and I truly believe we will provide justice for all those cold cases out there we so desperately want to help with.
Take a look:
We cannot thank Verogen and Anna, Dr. Meredith Turnbough and the rest of the Verogen staff for getting us to this point. We are going to rely on them to get us up and running quickly and start employing this technology on casework! Our goal is to "go live" in August or, at worse, September. It'll be a lot of hard work, but so SO worth it.
To commemorate, here's a picture of Alyssa McElreath pressing the "GO" button on the first run of our validation! Let's do this!
Can you tell we're a little excited? -Danny