SEMINAR: �NGS-based Biomedical Research in BGI."

BGI (formerly Beijing Genomics Institute, http://www.genomics.cn/en/index.php) is one of the largest genome centres in the world. As you may know, the complete genome of one species will define the related biological research through the coming decades. Since 1999, BGI has been a core participant in a large number of genome projects (1% of International Human Genome, 10% of the International Human HapMap Genome, Sino-British Chicken Genome, MetaHIT, etc) and also independently completed genomes of first Asian, rice, silkworm, panda and cucumber, etc. The achievements of BGI have been acknowledged by papers published in top academic journals, 17 of which were in Nature or Science during the last two years.

Besides being a research institute, BGI also offers services including but not limited to the following fields: Plant and Animal Genome, Microorganism Genome, Complex Disease/Cancer Research, Transcriptome/DGE/Small RNA/Degradome, Epigenomics, Proteomics and Biocloud Computing. Lots of papers have been published by BGI in these fields. Currently, BGI owns 137 illumina HiSeq 2000, 27 AB SOLiD 4.0 and over 30 units of ABI 3730 sequencers. In our world-class bioinformatics team, BGI has super computing platforms (102T flops, 20TB memory and 10PB storage), self-developed softwares (e.g. SOAP, Bioinformatics, 2008) and over 2000 bioinformatics scientists.

A number of large-scale international projects are currently underway including the Cancer Vaccine and Danish Genome Research project, 1000 Mendelian Disorders Project, Sino-Danish GWAS on Metabolic Disorder Project as well as the $30 million Epigenetics Project with King's College London. Eve (Jun) Li, representative of BGI-Australia, will share some related papers published by BGI alone or as collaboration with other scientists. She will bring some new ideas or solutions to the researchers in UWA.