Collaborative Services

We accept a variety of samples including nucleic acids, blood, fresh or frozen tissues, formalin-fixed/paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues, saliva and buccal (cheek) swabs. We also accept fully constructed libraries.

For more information about recommended starting material and plate/tube requirements for sequencing services, please refer to our user guides.

• For best library construction results please submit the recommended amount of starting material or more
• There recommended starting material in our user guides work well for human or mouse derived nucleic acids. Please enquire if you are working with other species.
• The amounts listed in our user guides are the minimum amount of starting material which will result in adequate sequencing results. Please contact us if your material is limiting

For more information please see FAQ.

Platform services at the GSC are collaborative and are available and accessible to any and all qualified researchers. Collaborative services are billed on a cost recovery, meaning that we charge only the costs of conducting the service. Pricing is based on the scope and type of work requested.

Where warranted due to a collaborator's requirements, we can operate on a fee-for-services basis. We encourage the use of the platform for commercial or service based activity on Terms and Conditions determined by the BC Cancer Technology Development Office. Regardless of the service type, the order of work and delivery of service follow the principles described below.

For all services, the order of work done is determined on a "first in, first on" principle, and we require that all researchers establish a statement of work with us for their activities prior to the submission of any samples. All work is queued in our systems based on the date of sample receipt. Turnaround times may vary widely, based not only on the numbers of samples or other work in the queue but also status of technology development; during times when instrument or systems upgrades are being installed or implemented, turnaround times may be affected while the platform adopts newer, better methods and technology.

Because we operate on a collaborative, cost-recovery basis, we are unable to offer volume discounts for large sample sets or to enable enhanced/faster service with surcharges or premiums.

Also, as a collaborative service provider, we require all collaborators accessing services to acknowledge the work performed by the GSC. Please see acknowledgement and reference policy for these requirements.

In order to gauge our scientific impact we attempt to track our contribution to the wider scientific community. This is done as part of our ongoing support for the activities of our collaborators, as well as to ensure we meet the requirements of both our funding partners and our charter as a non-profit agency. In order to achieve this, we require our collaborators to acknowledge the work performed by the GSC in any or all of the following ways:

1. The GSC does not request or require co-authorship on publications when data has been generated through their cost-recovery collaborative service alone, i.e. when no intellectual contribution has been made.
2. Where intellectual contributions have been made by the GSC, collaborators are required to discuss potential and pending publications based on these contributions with the relevant GSC scientists or staff to identify appropriate co-authorship.
3. At a minimum, acknowledgement of the work of the GSC should be included in peer-reviewed publications. The following sentence can be incorporated into the Acknowledgements section of the article: “The authors wish to acknowledge Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, Vancouver, Canada for [activity]." A full list of funders of infrastructure and research supporting the services accessed can be found on the About Us page. 
4. In addition, acknowledgements should appear in the text of peer-reviewed publications, for example in the Materials and Methods sections. A suggested sentence for inclusion is: “[Activity] was performed by Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, Vancouver, Canada”.

We would be very pleased to receive notification when collaborators publish papers acknowledging the GSC.