Student applicants must be undergraduate or graduate students in good academic standing, enrolled in a science or engineering course at an accredited college or university in the Philippines. Young professional applicants must have a BS degree in a science or engineering field, and be a researcher and/or faculty member employed at a research or higher education institution in the Philippines.
This will be held during the mid-year period from June 19 to July 28, 2023.
The DNA Sequencing Core Facility (DSCF) in partnership with Golden Bat and QIAGEN is conducting a FREE sequencing of AMR samples from April 17-19, 2023.
Interested participants shall write a one-page rationale on why they need their sample/s sequenced and send it to dnasequencing@pgc.up.edu.ph with the subject: AMR Sequencing [Entry]_Affiliation_Name
Deadline for entries is on March 31, 2023. For more information, contact Ma. Celeste S. Abad at msabad@up.edu.ph or dnasequencing@pgc.up.edu.ph and/or call 981-8500 loc. 4707
Details on how to send accepted samples will follow.
The PGC team’s dedication and resilience are a testament to the importance of scientific research and its ability to overcome even the most difficult of circumstances. #PGCParaSaBayan
To strengthen the partnerships among the collaborating institutions, a two-week joint-training session was held at the Tokyo Institute of Technology from January 23 to February 3, 2023. The aim of the training was to finalize and optimize a common analysis protocol across the three collaborating teams.
Please be advised that the respective core facilities (DSCF, CFB, PPMF, CGL) and the administrative services department of the Philippine Genome Center will be implementing reduced operations on October 19-21, 2022 for its annual strategic planning for operational efficiency and team building.
This variant, with its more than 30 mutations in the Spike region is hypothesized to be over twice as infectious and twice more likely to escape current vaccines than the Delta variant. Currently, Omicron consists of four (4) phylogenetic lineages: the main lineage B.1.1.529 and its three (3) sublineages: BA.1, BA.2, and BA.3. Based on global statistics, BA.1 is the predominant Omicron lineage being detected worldwide, but a recent increase in the proportion of BA.2 cases has also been observed.
The Philippine Genome Center (PGC) is hosting the Genomics and Bioinformatics Conference 2021 on December 7-9, themed Overcoming Challenges, Building Opportunities—the 3-day conference will consist of talks from experts in health, agriculture, livestock, and fisheries as well as in biodiversity, ethnicity, and forensics.
The new facility under the supervision of Dr. Neil Andrew D. Bascos, has been preparing for this much-awaited launch since last year. Together with his team of young researchers, they have been working on standardizing and optimizing laboratory protocols, and establishing research networks, to promote the use of multi-Omics technologies throughout the Philippines.
Since the Philippine Genome Center is mentioned and we have received numerous queries from colleagues in the country and the region, we are compelled to issue this Statement to address the following:
– the possible inference (from the way the Statement is written) that the head of the Philippine Genome Center’s (PGC) Program on Forensics and Ethnicity connived with the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) and Philippine Health Ethics Research Board (PHREB) against Dr. Larena and Prof. Jakobsson’s research or is responsible for their actions; and
– the imputation that the ethical issues raised by these agencies and PGC aim to discredit “good research” because the head of PGC’s Program on Forensics and Ethnicity is pursuing similar genetic research.
The Oxford Nanopore MinION is a portable sequencer and has the lowest instrument cost among all sequencing platforms with a 97.5 to >99.3% raw read accuracy (Oxford Nanopore Technologies, 2021). The technology has demonstrated its utility for sequencing biological entities, from the simple nano-sized viruses to complex plants and animals, generating sequence information that is sufficient to provide comprehensive insights into the underlying genome architecture. It has also been validated to produce SARS-CoV-2 consensus sequences with the same accuracy as other sequencing platforms (Bull et al., 2020 and Charre et al., 2020).
