Microbiome Facility

In response to the increasing realization of the role that microbes play in cancer prevention, pathogenesis and therapy, UPMC Hillman Cancer Center created the microbiome functional core facility.

The overall goal of this facility is to centralize microbiome benchwork and provide systematic service support from clinical or preclinical sample collection/banking, genomic processing to data analysis. Bioinformatics services include sequencing QC; taxonomic profiling; abundance analysis, such as alpha-diversity (e.g., Shannon index, Simpson index, phylogenetic diversity) determined by Kruskal-Wallis test and β-diversity analysis (e.g., Bray-Curtis distance, Jaccard Similarity and UniFrac distance) between sample groups determined by PERMANOVA analysis; functional analysis and Lefse analysis to identify the taxa biomarkers associated to phenotype or clinical outcome.