OMICS

The OMICs platform is a structure of the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanology (MIO) located in the Océanomed building on the Luminy Campus. OMICS is a platform that engages its analytical expertise in Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics for the taxonomic characterization of prokaryotes in ecosystems. The molecular biology part offers its skills for DNA/RNA extraction and amplification/quantification of target genes, for the characterisation of biodiversity, from samples from complex environments (salty, sediments, acids, etc.). The bioinformatics part offers expert analyses in digital ecology through the characterisation of prokaryotic biodiversity of ecosystems via high-throughput sequencing. In addition, this platform offers a “targeted metabolomics” component in the Molecular Biology section for the characterisation of prokaryotes via the identification of carbonaceous (lactate, acetate, pyruvate, etc.), sulphurous (thiosulphate, sulphate, etc.) and gaseous (CH4, N2O, HS-, etc.) metabolites via chromatographic approaches.

Finally, the platform also offers training open to the scientific community. This module offers users the opportunity to acquire the skills needed to process metabarcoding data using the latest expert tools in the field (Dada2 and Phyloseq packages). The key concepts are illustrated by means of a concrete study.

The platform is part of an ISO 9001v2015 quality approach

Facilities

Molecular biology equipment:
Fast prep, Qiacube, PCR, quantitative PCR (CFX96 biorad), QuBit, BiospecNano, BioAnalyzer, MultiScan-GO.
Metabolomics equipment:
LC-MS, GC-MS, Ion Chromatography, GC, FID.
Bioinformatics equipment:
Bioinformatics server, High performance computing cluster.