“Never change a running horse” is an old English saying. Well, we believe more in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s maxim, who once said more than 200 years ago:  “I don’t know whether it is getting any better if it becomes different. But it has to become different if it should be any better.” Since anything can always be improved as there is no such thing as perfection, we decided to create for you a brand new myGATC order system. And, on top, we will change our service portfolio starting 21 January, 2011.

Don’t be frightened. Actually, we made things easier. In the past, you had to know beforehand what article you planned to order. Now, you can order without knowing anything about our services. We will lead you through the order process in very logical steps. First you decide how to send your samples (in tubes or plates), then what you will provide (plasmids, PCR fragments, BAC, PAC, cosmids or ready-to-load reactions), and whether your delivered samples need purification or not. We have created a common spreadsheet, similar to an Excel table, in which you will define your sequencing reactions. You can even drag and drop barcodes visually into your order spreadsheet.

However, we agree that any change requires some learning in the beginning. To keep that to a minimum, we prepared a trailer to guide you through the new order process and set up a sneak preview so that you can explore the new system quickly and at your convenience.

The service portfolio required some modernization, too. There are some new services and some which did not make it to 2011. You can now send us BAC, PAC, cosmids or ready-to-load reactions in full or half 96 well plates. However, service articles BigRun (in tubes), SequenceYourself (in tubes), the GenomeRun and the complete range of primer walking services had to go. RIP. Nevertheless, if you are just planning a primer walking project – before you get annoyed please get in touch with us. We’ll find a solution.

We managed to decrease the required volume of DNA and custom primers from 30µl to 20µl. This will still be sufficient for up to eight reactions. However, we had to decrease the storage time of DNA and primers you provide from four weeks to five working days once the order is completed.

Here are the changes in an overview:

We continue to update myGATC 2011 during the year. Help us to develop innovative solutions that will make your lab life a bit easier. Please discuss with us your ideas, suggestions and criticism right here on the GATCBlog.

Best regards,
Jochen Schäfer