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Instrumentation Group

Group Responsibilities

The Instrumentation Group is an engineering and scientific support group to both the production sequencing process and the research groups at the JGI Production Genomics Facility in Walnut Creek, CA. the group is comprised of engineers, scientists, and technicians from both the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The primary goal for the production process support is to keep the existing machines up and running as well as to select and install new equipment to meet the process needs. Support for R&D activities is similar but often requires more emphasis toward custom instrumentation as necessary. The general operating philosophy is to purchase commercial instrumentation if at all possible, followed by modification of commercial equipment as necessary. If there are no commercial options then custom solutions will be employed if the resource, cost, and time constraints can be justified. The types of support provided by the Instrumentation Group include:

  • Equipment specification, selection, and purchasing coordination
  • Equipment installation in coordination with vendors and the Facilities Group
  • Equipment acceptance testing and protocol programming in coordination with the Process Optimization and Production Groups
  • Equipment maintenance: equipment calibration, preventative maintenance, service call coordination, on-site maintenance (electrical and mechanical) and troubleshooting
  • Equipment training
  • Project management
  • Safety engineering
    • Equipment safety
    • Production line ergonomics
    • Risk analysis
  • Electro - Mechanical Design and fabrication
    • Small fixturing, racks, carts, spare parts, repairs
    • Custom automation: in-house design and fabrication of automated equipment
    • Management of equipment projects with external engineering design contractors
  • Software design
    • Procotol programming on manufacturer-supplied programming platforms
    • Custom software design for instrument control (Visual Basic, C++, image analysis)
  • Industrial Engineering in the area of process mapping and analysis for improvements in: cycle time, throughput, quality, resource utilization, space utilization, and database reporting tools

At all times we try to operate by following high customer service standards: listening to the customer, negotiating a solution to the problem, keeping the customer informed of progress, and personnally following up on all work to see that it meets customer expectations.

JGI Production Line Instrumentation

The JGI production process utilizes state-of-the-art sequencing technologies including:

  • Illumina Genome Analyzer
  • Roche 454 Genome Sequencer FLX Instrument
  • Applied Biosystems 3730xl DNA Analyzer

Examples of JGI processing equipment include:

  • Genetix QPix2 and QPix2XT Colony Pickers
  • Matrix Platemate Plus Automated Pipetting System
  • Thermo Multidrop Combi NL
  • Beckman Biomek FX and NX Workstations
  • Cybi-Well vario Pipetting Robot and Cybi-Drop Dispenser
  • Applied Biosystem Dual 384-Well GeneAmp PCR System 9700
  • Genemachines HydroShear
  • Velocity11 PlateLoc thermal microtiter plate sealer and Benchcel Workstation
  • Molecular Devices SpectromaxPlus 384 Spectrophotometer
  • Hudson Plate Crane Microplate Robot

Examples of JGI custom engineering include:

  • Automated colony plating instrument
  • LBNL Custom Patented Magnetic Devices for magnetic bead applications 384 format microtiter plates
  • LBNL custom pneumatic plate sealer
  • LBNL custom plate seal peeler to automatically remove Velocity11 PlateLoc heat seals
  • A wide variety custom hand tools and fixturing to mitigate ergonomic risks in the manual production line tasks