Welcome to the GRT Hub—a resource dedicated to facilitating your genomics endeavors. Our experienced team provides valuable assistance in experimental planning, grant applications, and collaborative publications. Explore the comprehensive support offered by GRT Hub for effective and responsible genomics research.
Experimental Planning
Staff of the GRT Hub are experts excited to assist you in the overall conception and framing of the experimental workflow. If you are new to using the Hub or working with a particular instrument or technique, it is advised to meet as much in advance as possible with the Hub Manager, Melanie Oakes, PhD, in order to understand the workflow, expertise and resources that may be required as well as the time frame and cost to go from concept to product. In addition, for planning with regard to numbers of samples required for statistical robustness, meeting with the Director for Bioinformatics, Jenny Wu, PhD, is advised. For understanding your own computer resources that may be required, meeting with our expert in bioinformatic engineering, Ivan Chang, PhD, may also be helpful, particularly if your experiments are data intensive and you are new to UCI or the HPC3.
Grant Applications
Strategic planning for grants including experimental workflow, time for execution, data collection and analysis performed in the GRT Hub should be addressed as much in advance of the grant deadline as possible to ensure time to provide complete support. Direct assistance in grant writing is a recharged expense, however, grant planning, costing etc. is not.
Letters of support (LOS) The GRT Hub can provide either a standard LOS, or a customized version. In either case, when requesting such a letter, please provide the PI name(s), agency and title of the grant, and abstract or other brief description of the goal and aims of the research and nature of genomics experimental workflow. Please follow-up by letting us know if your application was successful or if we can assist with the resubmission.
Budgeting for GRT Hub genomics iLab has a complete list of the rates for work in the GRT Hub; however, these rates do not necessarily include supplies, so you are advised when starting a new series of experiments to confer with the GRT Hub staff to accurately project both the cost of reagents and the recharge rate from the Hub covering the Hub’s expenses in service contracts and staff time. Also, please check with your specific center regarding any supplements related to membership in the Cancer Center or Skin P30 and with the Manager for any volume related discounts.
Budgeting for computational staff time, computing cycles, hardware and software resources. NIH now appropriately stresses budgeting for data analysis including expert time compensation and computational resources. Staff can advise on the extent of these types of resources likely to be required and the suitability of HPC3 to support.
Publications
As the experimental workflow is reduced to and progresses into the data collection phase, it will be important to rigorously collect data and evaluate in real time to ensure that the expected data types are going to actually fulfill SOPs the needs for addressing the hypothesis or discovery mission. Upon completion of the experiment with appropriate records of the work, the staff can, on a recharge basis, assist with drafting parts of the experimental design, data collection, and analysis, and graphical displays, in which they were involved or before which they can be provided with complete documentation to facilitate the draft description. It is appropriate when there are creative contributions by the staff to include them in authorship on publications. This benefits the staff obviously, but in also your own efforts when you cite them as experts involved in your next grant application or letter of support from the GRT Hub.
User responsibilities
Data management and genomics data sharing As of January 2023, NIH requires a Data Sharing and Management Plan. We strongly advise review of the guidance directly from the NIH Website (https://sharing.nih.gov/data-management-and-sharing-policy) where there are draft examples and lists of sites appropriate for data sharing related to your research. While the staff can advise on these issues, the laboratory PI is responsible for insuring compliance with this NIH requirement.
Data security The GRT Hub is not certified to collect or store HIPAA data. At this time the UCI IRB does not consider human genome sequence readily identifiable and therefore if samples are properly de-identified, at this time, the IRB does not consider that the data require a HIPAA secure platform. Only de-identified samples should be submitted for GRT Hub analysis.
Biohazards Samples that require hands-on processing by the staff associated with risk (including biological (all human samples) or chemical), must be specifically identified to the Hub Manager in advance of submission and documented in the iLab submission, so that judgement may be made as to whether they can be safely and appropriately processed by the staff.