GENYSIS Funding
Funding Opportunities
Funding Mechanisms for Core Customers
The Office of Research Technologies supports the efforts of PIs applying for funding for partial use supporting a university core facility.
SOM Core Facility Voucher Program
The Office of Research Technologies and Core Facilities Advocacy Committee (CFAC) voucher program is intended for UNC researchers (from any school) to apply for up to $10,000 in funding to be spent at one or more SOM core facilities.
Funding Received by GENYSIS
March 2025:
GENYSIS was awarded a grant from the Core Facility Advocacy Committee (CFAC) to expand Long-Read Sequencing (LRS) services to identify aberrant methylation either as allele-specific methylation (ASM) or as a genome wide profile (called an episignature) of differentially methylated regions (DMRs). It has recently been demonstrated that Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) LRS methylation analysis is comparable to commercially available methylation testing (EpiSignTM) in detecting episignatures associated with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) (Geysens M, et al. 2025). LRS methylation analysis not only has the potential to increase the diagnostic yield of genetic testing for NDDs, but can also be used to investigate skewed X-inactivation, imprinting errors, cancer gene promoter status, chromatin accessibility, or cell type classification (Fu Y, et al. 2025). The funds will be used to investigate open-source methylation analysis programs and inclusion of chosen aspects within the LRS pipeline.
December 2023:
Dr. Michael Adams submitted an application to the Core Facilities Advocacy Committee (CFAC) voucher program and was awarded ~$3k to investigate if the diagnostic yield of negative commercial genomes could be enhanced by re-analysis of the sequencing data via the GENYSIS pipeline. This project will focus on identifying missed small copy number variants (CNVs) and variants in genes on the differential due to additional phenotypic data.
October 2023:
GENYSIS submitted a method development request to the Core Facility Advocacy Committee (CFAC) and was awarded, in conjunction with funding from Dr. Neeta Vora’s prenatal sequencing grants, ~$24k towards developing a long-read sequence analysis pipeline. This GENYSIS project will involve collaboration amongst multiple UNC core and clinical lab services, including culturing frozen prenatal samples in the McLendon Cytogenetics laboratory, DNA extraction at the BioSpecimen Processing Facility (BSP), long-read sequencing using an Oxford Nanopore (ONP) instrument at the High Throughput Sequencing Facility (HTSF), and bioinformatics support from the Bioinformatics and Analytics Research Collaborative