IBIS team including our researcher Davoud Torkamaneh develops genomic analysis method that reduces plastic waste by 90%
A team from the Institute for Integrative and Systems Biology (IBIS), including our researcher Davoud Torkamaneh, a professor in the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences at Laval University, has developed a method that substantially reduces the volume of plastic waste and the costs associated with genomic analysis.
If you’ve done in-house testing for COVID-19, you’ve probably noticed that swabs, vials, tubes and tube racks end their useful life in the trash. Now imagine the amount of waste generated by laboratories performing much more sophisticated genomic analysis on tens of thousands of samples each year.
It was this concern that prompted François Belzile and Davoud Torkamaneh, professors in the Department of Plant Sciences, and Brian Boyle, coordinator of the genomic analysis platform at Laval University’s Institute of Integrative and Systems Biology (IBIS), to look for greener ways to conduct genomic analyses. And the solution they found is yielding spectacular results: it reduces the volume of plastic waste by 90%, while cutting analysis costs by 70%.
The key to these improvements? “We adapted an existing technology so that we could perform genomic analysis on very small sample volumes,” explains Professor Torkamaneh. Moreover, thanks to this process, it is no longer necessary to use pipette tips during manipulations.”
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