Our Expertise

CGEn builds on the combined knowledge and expertise of the three nodes in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.  These centres have an extensive track record in genomic science, leading, collaborating with and servicing the most important genomics programs in Canada from academic, private, and government sectors. Disciplines extend far beyond biomedical and health research, such as environment, infectious disease, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, zoology, botany, ecology, metagenomics, biofuels, bioremediation, disease surveillance, evolutionary biology, and others.

The CGEn team also has a strong track record in method and technology development generating some of the earliest publications for RNA sequencing, and for analyzing histone modifications.

A number of bioinformatics tools developed by the CGEn centres have been adopted by researchers across the globe, examples include the CIRCOS viewer, which provides a graphical synopsis of genomic changes and alterations, the ABySS assembler, which was the first short read assembler capable of assembling mammalian sized genomes, and the GenPipes pipeline, which is a Python-based framework that facilitates the development and deployment of multi-step genomic workflows, optimized for High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters and the cloud.

Our Infrastructure

The CGEn platform, distributed across the three CGEn nodes, includes the most current sequencing technologies and analysis methodologies. In 2023, CGEn completed the installation of the Illumina NovaSeq X Plus and PacBio Revio sequencers that enable increased throughput, faster and more affordable sequencing for short-read and long-read applications, respectively.

To enable the data processing and storage of this deluge of genomic information, the CGEn platform is supported by an equally impressive computational and data storage infrastructure, which currently includes over 50,000 compute cores, over 26 Petabytes of storage, and an equivalent amount of archive storage. CGEn’s partnership with the Digital Research Alliance of Canada enables access to additional relevant computational resources. CGEn is also a key partner in the Pan-Canadian Genome Library.

Our Services

CGEn provides state-of-the-art genomics support to world-leading research projects addressing important biological questions. The three CGEn nodes combine their expertise to adopt and integrate new technologies, develop innovative protocols, create new databases, and pioneer new bioinformatics tools to decode whole genomes from humans and other species.

Our platform of sequencing instruments is accessible to Canadian and international researchers from all disciplines in academic, private, and government sectors for complete high-throughput, low-cost, and high-quality sequence generation and analysis services. CGEn also provides additional services supporting a wide range of genomic applications. Learn more about each node and its wide range of services and technologies by visiting their websites linked below.