A few days ago, the Center for Single-Cell Omics team composed of He Jian, Meng Mei and Zhou Xianchao won the second prize in the second national automatic library construciton competition. According to the winning representative He Jian, this award is a recognition of the ability of the single-cell omics team of the School of Public Health in high-throughput sequencing. It is reported that the prize money has been donated by the team to the "Student Relay" project of Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan Province.

With the maturity and cost reduction of high-throughput sequencing technology, the sequencing technology has been widely used in genetic eugenics, tumor diagnosis and treatment and other scientific research and clinical. In recent years, single-cell high-throughput sequencing has been continuously developed and applied to a variety of application scenarios such as whole genome, whole exome, full-length transcriptome, methylation group analysis of single cell (nucleus), transcriptome sequencing of high-throughput single cell (nucleus) and even spatial transcriptome. The construction of single-cell libraries is the premise of the above sequencing scheme, and automated library construction can simplify the workflow, reduce manual errors, and build faster, more stable, and higher quality libraries. In order to carry out research based on high-throughput sequencing technology more efficiently, flexibly and economically, the Center for Single-Cell Omics introduced the whole process platform of high-throughput sequencing of BGI Intelligent Manufacturing in 2021, including the high-throughput sequencing system MGISEQ-2000, the automated sample preparation automatic system MGISP-100 and the supporting single-cell omics program to serve scientific research.

The second National Automation Library Construction Competition was jointly initiated by BGI Intelligent Manufacturing and Shanghai Genetics Society, and is open to laboratory professionals in scientific research institutions, hospitals, third-party independent medical examination centers, and public health systems across the country. The competition attracted more than 100+ participants from more than 50 institutes such as universities, hospitals, and medical laboratories across the country. The competition lasted for 3 months, and went through a series of competition stages such as theoretical training and assessment, practical training and assessment, and bioinformatics analysis, etc., focusing on the examination of the actual operation and application of the participants.