Our Services
Liquid Biopsy
The liquid biopsy is a brand new technique capable of replacing the classic tissue biopsy, using peripheral blood samples instead of tissues. The use of blood samples renders this technique much less invasive than its predecessor.
Liquid biopsy can be used to diagnose and monitor cancers, by studying circulating tumour cells and circulating tumour DNA, which are carried in patients’ blood.
Furthermore, liquid biopsy can be exploited for prenatal diagnosis, analysing the circulating fetal DNA available in the mother’s blood.
Bioinformatics Analysis
The analysis of data produced during Next Generation Sequencing experiments requires a peculiar mix of expertise, including Biology, Informatics, Statistics and Maths. Next Generation Sequencing techniques allow the gathering of a wide range of information about an individual, but these data need to be accurately filtered and interpreted.
Bioinformatics data analysis is needed to process these raw information, in order to provide clinicians with a narrow set of relevant data to better understand the starting biological question, and possibly answer it efficiently.
Sequencing
Sequencing is a technique that allows to “read” the DNA composition of an individual, in order to collect a set of genetic information, useful to assess the person’s health condition and to cure diseases.
The most recent sequencing techniques are called Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), and provide a wide and deep genome analysis, which can be of different types depending on the biological problem to investigate.
The classic Sanger sequencing, instead, is not as massive as NGS, but is used to analyse specific genomic regions and to validate NGS data analysis results.
Counselling
Designing and performing biological experiments can be daunting, and if not conceived correctly, can provide wrong and harmful results.
An accurate knowledge of the starting biological question and of specific techniques to face it is fundamental. Our experts are available to help you plan and perform successfully many kinds of scientific projects.
Liquid biopsy from peripheral blood samples
Genome, exome and transcriptome sequencing and re-sequencing
Extraction of genomic material from biological samples and quality estimation of the extracted material
Extraction and analysis of mitochondrial DNA from Whole Exome and Whole Genome Sequencing data, with qualitative and quantitative analysis of the mitochondrial transcriptome
In vitro and/or in vivo validation of nuclear variants predicted as functionally pathogenic
In vitro and/or in vivo validation of mitochondrial variants predicted as functionally pathogenic
Development of pipelines for personalised analyses
Identification of genome or transcriptome variants and their functional annotation
Qualitative analysis of transcriptome to identify different types of RNA, including microRNAs and non-codingRNAs
Quantitative analysis of transcriptome (differential expression analysis) with the integration of genetic variants and genic expression variants, using eQTL approaches
Primer design for sequencing projects
Library preparation for NGS sequencing of DNA, RNA and cDNA
Identification of DNA/RNA and Protein interactions
Safe data storage