November 2021
The DOE Joint Genome Institute conducted an extensive internal product audit to analyze the scientific value, demand, and costs of current offerings in the JGI product catalog. The resulting information is being used to prioritize products for potential future expansion or elimination. A detailed summary of the findings revealed a set of JGI products of low scientific impact and low demand, yet high cost and extensive labor requirements. The JGI will discontinue these products.
The JGI will no longer offer smRNA, bisulfite, or ChIP sequencing, beginning with FY23 proposals. Eliminating these products creates an opportunity to redirect resources toward making new and potentially more impactful capabilities aligned with the DOE mission available to the JGI user community.
The JGI will honor existing commitments – e.g., smRNA, bisulfite, or ChIP sequencing requests – that are part of approved JGI proposals. The relevant Project Manager will contact those whose proposals entail these requests to discuss sample availability and estimated shipping schedules.
August 2017
In April of 2017, the JGI’s Prokaryotic Super Program Advisory Committee recommended that the JGI phase out iTag sequencing from our product portfolio considering the numerous commercial and academic sequencing centers that can now provide this service. This recommendation further rationalized that JGI should focus their community sequencing and analysis efforts on more complex products in line with our DOE mission mandate, such as shotgun metagenomics and metatranscriptomics. Based on this high priority recommendation from our advisory committee and our internal analysis of resources and costs, the JGI has decided to phase out all amplicon sequencing services beginning September 2017 while increasing library, sequencing and analysis capacity for other products. This decision opens opportunities for increased metagenome sequencing capacity, and developing and applying new approaches for community profiling through metagenomics.
For all outstanding commitments and calls in progress, including the large-scale CSP18 call, the JGI will accept samples for iTag sequencing until March 1, 2018.