The University of Sheffield
About the center
The MND Association has collected over 3,000 samples in its national DNA Bank, including around 1,500 samples from donors with non-hereditary ALS. The Association intends to sequence the genomes of all these ALS patient samples, with the data to be shared across the Project MinE consortium. The MND Association is committed to raising £800,000 towards the project in the next two years.
The UK MND DNA Bank contains over 3,000 samples donated by people with MND, family members and non-MND controls for use in genetic research to understand the disease. Together with the accompanying, anonymised information on the participants, these blood samples have been used to create an important resource for use by MND researchers now and in the future.
The logistics of the collection of samples for the DNA Bank was based on a ‘hub and spoke’ model. The hub centres were based at the institutes of the Principal Investigators: Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi and Professor Chris Shaw at King’s College London, Professor Pamela Shaw at Sheffield, and Professor Karen Morrison in Birmingham. Each hub centre co-ordinated the collection of samples for a number of spoke centres.
All DNA samples within the DNA Bank are stored in -80°C freezers at Biobanking Solutions within the Centre for Intergrated Genomic Medicine, University of Manchester. The majority of samples are also stored as lymphoblastoid cell lines, cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen at the European Collection of Cell Cultures facility within Public Health England.
