FAQ

No!  SPARC BioCentre services are available to anybody who wishes to take advantage of them.  The price structure for services, however, is different depending whether you are from SickKids, the academic community, or a commercial entity.

There are numerous precautions that can be taken to ensure that there is minimal keratin contamination as well as chemical interference with your samples.  The following is only a guide; however, care should be taken at all steps of the sample preparation process.  This is perhaps the most important part of the process!

Wear gloves and lab coats at all times. Furthermore, use clean reagents, glassware, and plasticware to avoid keratin contamination from your skin and dust ie. new bags of tips and microcentrifuge tubes.

Specific to SDS-PAGE Gels:

• If you are running a SDS-PAGE gel ahead of sample preparation, please consider using pre-cast gels, or at very minimum use new glass plates, as well as clean, new, boxes for staining.
• When cutting gel bands out, use clean materials and work in a laminar flow hood whenever possible. Cut bands using a clean scalpel, and cut out each protein band.  Gel slices should not be wider then 2-3 mm. Cutting exactly around the band, avoiding excess gel, drastically improves your results.
• Do not combine multiple bands into the same tube
• Gel slices should be stored in 1% acetic acid at 4^oC prior to analysis.

Specific to in-solution samples:

• Detergents (NP-40, Triton-X, Tween-20) can lead to the detection of a polymer-like background on the mass spectrometer, and can bind to the C18 column, subsequently preventing your peptides from binding. Avoid these detergents if possible; however, if they are necessary, we can employ techniques to remove them.
• While SDS does not produce a polymer like background, significant amounts of SDS are also not compatible with mass spectrometry. Again, we can employ techniques to remove SDS at certain concentration levels, but be sure to let us know if your samples contain SDS.
• In the case of immunoprecipitation samples, detergents and glycerol can be used, however, we request that you wash your beads with wash buffer 2X followed by 2-3 washes with wash buffer re-made to not contain detergent or glycerol. Once these additional steps are performed all the liquid can be removed and the beads can either be frozen and shipped to SPARC or proteins can be eluted off.

Gel bands should be shipped at room temperature or at 4^oC.

In-solution or liquid protein samples should be frozen and submitted on dry ice.

Lyophilized proteins and/or peptides can be shipped at room temperature.

Serum/plasma/tissue samples should typically be frozen and shipped on dry ice.

Please refer to price lists under each service heading for the cost of analysis. We are happy to provide a quote for your individual project. For quotes for budgeting reasons, please contact the Facility Manager at least one week in advance of deadline. For quotes to generate a PO for samples about to be submitted, submit a request in QReserve and then email the Facility Manager to request a quote.

You will be invoiced after the project is complete via email, at the end of the month during which the work was completed. Payment can be made through internal cost center for SickKids investigators and by purchase order, wire transfer, or credit card for external investigators. International customers must pre-pay for mass spectrometry analysis services.

SPARC BioCentre operates on a cost recovery basis. The fees we charge go directly to operations of the facility, including staff salaries, consumables such as analytical columns and solvents, and maintenance services on mass spectrometers and other instruments.

This depends on what service you are requesting. In general, we process samples on a continual basis and operate on a first-come, first-served basis. Once samples have arrived at our facility and a QReserve request has been made, your samples will enter our queue. For amino acid analysis by HPLC and proteomics projects, we typically provide data within two weeks, but larger projects or unforeseen maintenance issues occasionally necessitate extra time. For small molecule mass spectrometry and immunoassay projects, turnaround time varies depending on current demand and the number of samples. We will do our best to give you an estimate once the samples arrive.

We strive to keep RAW data as long as we can, but encourage users who would like their RAW data to ask for it at the time of experiment.  We will store RAW data for at least one year from the date of your experiment.

Searched data will be kept for six months from the date of your experiment.  We encourage you to treat your data file like any other file, and back it up in multiple places.

SPARC operates on a cost-recovery basis and collects fees for service to offset operating costs, which include significant expenses associated with the maintenance and quality control of instrumentation. In cases where intellectual contributions have been made by SPARC staff, which may or may not include formal collaboration agreements, co-authorship on publications may be appropriate following usually accepted scientific practices and journal requirements.

In addition, to satisfy reporting requirements of funding partners and to monitor our scientific impact as a core facility, we require that clients agree to recognize SPARC in publications (e.g., journal articles and poster presentations) and to share this information with SPARC. Acceptable recognition of work performed by SPARC includes co-authorship if appropriate or acknowledgement as follows:

(A) In the Acknowledgments section of manuscripts/posters a statement be included such as: The authors wish to thank [name of SPARC personnel] at SPARC BioCentre, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada for performing [analysis performed; e.g., metabolic flux analysis; or mass spectrometry data generation and analysis ]; AND

(B) In the body of manuscripts, when data emanating from SPARC are first mentioned or in the corresponding Methods section the following language is suggested: [Service, e.g., mass spectrometry and associated data analysis] was performed at SPARC BioCentre, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada.