The Sanger Centre is collaborating with the aid of funding from Britain's Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council. The collaborators initially will focus on chromosome 7, and on regions of chromosomes 22 and X, a sex chromosome that has been studied extensively by other Washington University researchers. Their previous work with a region of chromosome 13 facilitated the discovery of the breast cancer gene BRCA2. The Genome Sequencing Center currently has 160 employees, and it uses 59 Applied Biosystems DNA Sequencers. It also has designed and built a robot called a clone harvester, whose vision system and robotic mechanism enable it to transfer bacterial clones from agar plates to tubes.
Smaller robots help purify DNA and perform sequencing reactions.
The center's team structure contributes greatly to its efficiency. Each team consists of ten entry-level workers called production technicians, who prepare the DNA, perform the sequencing reactions and load the sequencing machines. A team also has twelve advanced technicians called finishers, who make subclone libraries and solve sequence problems. Each team was sequencing at a rate of about 7 million base pairs per year.