Operational Area Service of the CORE Molecular Biology Laboratory Service

The CORE Molecular Biology Laboratory is part of the Biomedical Diagnostic Center (CBD) of the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona. It was created in 2015 to centralize and automate the main molecular biology techniques that are carried out in the different CBD services. The use of state-of-the-art techniques, such as mass sequencing (NGS), free circulating DNA analysis or Nanostring technology, place the CORE of Molecular Biology at the forefront of clinical diagnostic laboratories in our country.

As a fundamental part of the development of the laboratory, the CORE of Molecular Biology has an bioinformatics area whose aim is developing algorithms that allow the personnel to examine and validate in a precise way the heavy flow of information that is generated.

The Laboratory is organized in different areas:

• Nucleic acid extraction
• qPCR
• Sanger sequencing
• Mass sequencing (NGS) and emerging technologies
• Bioinformatics

The CORE Molecular Biology Laboratory is highly automated and is dedicated to the processing of samples for genetic diagnosis. The main workflows, such as nucleic acid extraction, Sanger sequencing, and a part of mass sequencing, have robotic platforms for processing, which allows them to optimize and increase the performance and to process a large number of samples quickly and accurately.