Our team
If you have a specific microbiome research need that is not listed in our services offer, please contact us. We want to meet your microbiome research needs!
On this photo:
The leadership group:
Dr. Corinne Maurice, Dr Benoît Cousineau, Dr Irah King, Dr Jesse Shapiro (absent from this photo)
The Centre professionals:
Caroline Monat, M.Sc., Microbiologist, Microbial Services Platform – Culturing Laboratory, Dr. Benoit Cousineau's Laboratory
Anshul Sinha, Bioinformatician, Microbial Services Platform (absent from this photo)
Catherine Hudon, Laboratory technician, Gnotobiotic Animal Research Platform (absent from this photo)
Frédérique Nadeau, Laboratory technician, Gnotobiotic Animal Research Platform (absent from this photo)
Cynthia Faubert, Program manager
Gnotobiotic Animal Research Platform
Based at the Research Institute of the MUHC at the Glen site, the MI4 Gnotobiotic Animal Research Platform provides live animal testing to directly elucidate the effects of specific microbiome ecologies and how microbial communities can be modified and optimized for improved health. The platform supports clients throughout their project, from the initial contact by offering consulting services to effectively determine needs with the goal of optimizing time and human and financial resources.
Specific Infrastructure:
- Housing capacity of 140 ISOcages;
- Technology allowing both CL1 and CL2 experiments;
- High standard procedures, controlled environment and specialized personal;
- Germ free health status validation prior inoculation for experiments;
- Quality control program developed in collaboration with the Microbial Genomics Platform.
Technical support:
- Techniques related to microbiome experiments: injection, gavage, feces collection, body weight, blood collection;
- Sterilization and validation of experimental material;
- Reception of germ free mice from external suppliers;
- In-house germ-free breeding colony; gnotobiotic breeding colonies available upon request.
- Development of advanced techniques upon request: necropsy, tissue collection, surgery.
We are currently updating our pricing lists. To know more about the in vivo services, contact us at cynthia.faubert@mcgill.ca.
Microbial Services Platform
microbial_genomics_offer_pricing_list.pdf
The human microbiome—the ecosystems of micro-organisms in us and on us—is a new frontier in health research. Mostly still unknown to science, these microbes permeate our skin, mouths, lungs, genitals, gastro-intestinal tracts and interact with our own cells for healthy body functioning.
Based at the Lyman Duff Medical Science building, the Microbial Services Platform offers strong expertise in microbiology to assess microbial content and identify key microbes associated with health and disease. By offering specialized services for a variety of sample types, our experts aim to support the microbiome research community to better understand the spectrum of beneficial and detrimental roles of the microbiome in health and disease, and to develop new and improved health care strategies.
Culturing and nucleic acid extraction services
Equipped with a QIAcube robot and an anaerobic chamber, combined with the expertise of our microbiologists, the Microbial Services Platform is offering customized services for pathogen and microbiome application and can process various types of samples:
- Consultation and experimental design
- DNA extractions
- Multiple species culturing, isolation, and identification
To know more about the culturing and nucleic acid extraction services, contact us at: microbial.services@mcgill.ca.
Bioinformatics services
New services! - Motivated by a commitment to extracting meaningful insights from complex datasets through the use of reproducible analytical pipelines, and by a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration, the the Microbial Services Platform is now offering e new expertise within these services:
- 16S (short and long-read) bacterial community composition and diversity
- Bacterial shotgun metagenomes
- Community composition profiling, assembly, binning into MAGs, annotations
- Viral metagenome analyses
- Assembly, viral detection/annotation, host prediction, community profiling
- Training resources
- Access to teaching documentation for 16S/shotgun metagenome analyses, and intro to high-power computing
- Grant writing and editing
- Project/experiment design consultation
- Manuscript ready custom figures
To know more about the bioinformatics services, contact us at: anshul.sinha@mcgill.ca
Sequencing services
Offered by the McGill Genome Centre (MGC) and supported by a multidisciplinary expertise, the sequencing services can produce, manage and interpret large amounts of genomics data generated at low cost and with high quality. To know more about the sequencing services, visit the MGC website - https://www.mcgillgenomecentre.ca/ - or contact them at: pm.genome@mcgill.ca.
