The IDI Genomics and Microbiology Solutions Laboratory (IDI-GEMS), formerly known as the Applied Microbiology Services Lab (AMSL), was established in the spring of 2020 as an earnings operation established through a partnership between the Infectious Diseases Institute and the Department of Microbiology. To address the COVID-19 pandemic, the IDI-GEMS gained federal accreditation for diagnostic testing (CLIA) and performed over 850,000 diagnostic PCR tests and produced over 10,000 full SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences from clinical and environmental samples as part of the campus pandemic monitoring and surveillance program.
In its post-pandemic transition, the IDI-GEMS is committed facilitating interdisciplinary research collaborations by providing consulting, research design, and testing services with emphasis on microbial metagenomic sequence analyses. IDI-GEMS is an incubator laboratory that supports the translation of scientific concepts into services or platforms, facilitating both research and business innovation.
The IDI-GEMS is equipped with 15 biosafety cabinets for infectious sample handling at BSL1/2, four clean bench molecular work stations, 20 quantitative multicolor thermal cyclers, two DNA/ RNA extraction robots (Promega Maxwell and Hamilton STAR), two liquid handlers (Biomek) for sequence library preparation, a NextSeq2000 sequencer, and metagenomic/microbial analysis pipelines built out in partnership with the Ohio State University Center of Microbiome Science, Amazon Web Services and the Ohio Supercomputer Center.
