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Andor Kiss
Last Updated: 02/11/2025
The Center for Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics (CBFG) has a full time staff scientist; Dr. Andor Kiss who serves as its Director as well as handling the day-to-day oversight, long-term planning, securing grant funding (intramural and extramural), as well as new protocol development, training new users, performs on-demand sample analysis, routine maintenance of equipment and accounting related to the CBFG. The CBFG main wet laboratory is housed in a 232 m2 suite that serves as an undergraduate, graduate, post-doctoral and principal investigator ‘hands-on’ full service training facility in the main biological science building (Pearson Hall) at Miami University. The CBFG is composed of a main wet laboratory, a flow cytometry core, an A/V & Internet equipped conference room that seats twelve, a computer room that houses eight high-end workstations. Access to the CBFG is on-demand by users via swipe-card after business hours. The CBFG houses a Pacific Biosciences VEGA benchtop long-read system, an Oxford Nanopore Technologies minION and an Illumina® MiSeq™ Next Generation Sequencing instrumentation, an ABI Capillary Electrophoresis Genetic Analyzer (3130xl); an Eppendorf epMotion 5073m NGS liquid handling workstation; a Promega MaxwellRSC Nucleic Acid extraction robot; four real-time qPCR instruments (Rotor-Gene Q with HRM, a Bio-Rad CFX Connect, a QuantStudio 7 Flex [384/96 well interchangeable blocks]), and a Bio-Rad ddPCR QX200 system, a four laser Attune NxT Flow Cytometer for analysis, a three laser BD FACS Melody Flow Cytometer for sorting, two UV NanoDrop spectrophotometers (ND1000, ND2200), and a NanoDrop (ND3300) Fluorospectrophotometer; a Promega Quantus, an Agilent Bioanalyzer 2100; a Covaris M220 Ultrasonic Nucleic Acid Shearer, a Sage BluePippin, seven 96 well gradient capable PCR thermal cyclers, two thermally controlled table top centrifuges capable of accepting 96-well plates used for DNA template preparation; two Eppendorf ThermoMixer C mixing units (384 well PCR to 50 mL tube format), two benchtop micro-centrifuges, Molecular Devices SpectraMax iD5 microplate reader, an ÄKTA-FPLC with UV detector and fractions collector, a UV-1600PC UV-VIS Spectrophotometer with Sipper module, an AlphaInnotechHP Gel Imaging System, Bio-Rad ChemiDoc MP Imaging System, Bio-Rad Dodeca-Cell Criterion PAGE system, several Bio-Rad Mini-Protean Gel Apparatus, Bio-Rad IEF Focusing Cells; numerous power-packs for gel electrophoresis, DNA gel boxes, pipettors, multi-channel pipettors. Eight computers (Linux & Win10), including four powerful Ubuntu O/S based workstations that have (a) a dual socket CPU AMD EPYC (128 logical cores), dual RTX TITAN nVIDIA GPUs, 2 TB DDR4 2666 MHz ECC RAM, 25 TB RAID10 HDD running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, (b) an AMD Ryzen ThreadRipper PRO 3955WX 16 Cores with 512 GB EEC RAM, a 4090 NVIDIA GPU, 30 TB RAID10 storage array, (c) Opteron 16 Core Processor with 256GB ECC RAM and (d) an Intel CORE Quad CPU with 32GB ECC RAM, (e) Intel Xeon E5620 with 192GB EEC RAM – all for genome assembly and related bioinformatics analyses. The CBFG maintains paid licenses for CLC Genomics Workbench, CLC Main Workbench, BioBam OmicsBox, SnapGene, FlowJo 10, SoftMax 7.1, Biogazelle qBasePLUS, and CANOCO. CBFG staff maintain a direct line of communication (e.g. policy, equipment outages) with users via a LISTSERV <BIOINF@listserv.miamioh.edu>; as well as enables trained users to reserve equipment online using an electronic calendaring software <http://mualwebp01.mcs.miamioh.edu/cgi-bin/cbfg4/Calcium40.pl>. The CBFG is also responsible for implementing communications protocols between the CBFG workstations and Miami University’s High Performance Computing facilities (on-site RedHawk HPC, and Columbus based Ohio Supercomputing Center; OSC) for effective bioinformatics data processing and computation (e.g. NCBI+ Tools, R, IPScans, CANU, HGAP4, FALCON, HiFiASM, HiCanu, Trinity, ntEdit, wtdbg2, Maker2; JASPER; BRAKER3) of large datasets.
Services are offerred outside of Miami University
Consulting is offerred outside of Miami University
