SEQUENCING THE PANDEMIC AT
THE NORTH TEXAS GENOME CENTER
By Avery Gregurich
Mural outside the North Texas Genome Center created by UTA Art students in October 2020
Since the facility first opened its doors in 2018, the North Texas Genome Center has become a world-class research and teaching facility. A collaborative venture between multiple universities, medical centers, and corporate partners, the NTGC is housed in the Science & Engineering Innovation & Research (SEIR) Building on UTA’s campus. The NTGC offers high-speed, low-cost library preparation and sequencing and bioinformatic services to enhance the biotechnology and biomedical research communities. The NTGC performs this work with two Illumina NovaSeq-6000 genome-scale sequencing systems, allowing the center to sequence over 10,000 human genomes annually.
Anajane Smith, MA, is the Program Manager Interdisciplinary Research at the NTGC. She has been responsible for acquiring the center’s laboratory accreditations. The NTGC received its Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments certification in early 2020, allowing the center to work not only with companies and researchers in the genome sciences, but also in real-time with health care providers supplying clinical insights and diagnostics.
In early 2021, after an on-site lab inspection review, the NTGC received its College of American Pathologists (CAP) accreditation. CAP is the world’s largest organization of board-certified pathologists and a leading provider of laboratory accreditation and proficiency testing programs. Dr. Jon Weidanz, Professor in Kinesiology, Founding Director of the North Texas Genome Center, and Associate Vice President for Research, said “CAP regulations are the gold standard for clinical diagnostic labs.”
Smith credits the center’s Medical Director, Professor in Graduate Nursing, and Executive Director of Health Research Dr. Florence Haseltine, with guiding the center’s research toward an understanding of COVID-19 susceptibility and severity, and particularly, COVID-19 “long-haulers.”
The certification “confirms the workflow process, documentation, and data generated are reproducible and of high quality,” he said.
When the pandemic began, the NTGC was asked to adapt its facility into a COVID-19 test site, focusing on processing PCR tests for its research staff and the student athlete population. Smith, along with Senior Research Scientist Zibiao Guo, Ph.D., executed the validation work and initial testing, and at its peak the Center tested over 400 samples per week from members of the UTA population.
The pandemic has provided the basis for some of the center’s immediate future research projects. Smith said the center is in the early stages of getting the technology established in the laboratory to perform next generation sequencing on the COVID-19 samples that they identify in the UTA population. Ultimately, she hopes this next generation sequencing will help identify COVID-19 variants that may appear on campus.
The center plans to perform DNA sequencing on the genes reported to be involved in the body’s response to infection for individuals who have consented to participate. Smith credits the center’s Medical Director, Professor in Graduate Nursing, and Executive Director of Health Research Dr. Florence Haseltine, with guiding the center’s research toward an understanding of COVID-19 susceptibility and severity, and particularly, COVID-19 “long-haulers.”
“Florence is very interested in the effect of sex difference in human disease. She’s very passionate, has a deep understanding of the whole clinical situation, and the impact that genomics has on what’s happening within the body,” Smith said. “There’s been a lot of information that men are more susceptible to COVID-19 than women, and so we’re looking for differences between men and women by doing whole exome sequencing on individuals that have tested positive. Trying to understand the genomics of what’s happening hopefully ultimately leads to better treatment and possibly overcoming those impacts.”