Most of the gastric tumor samples that Ji’s team were able to sequence over the past year came from the Intermountain Healthcare Biorepository, which provided the GCR with samples from 154 gastric cancer patients. Additional samples came from patients who enrolled in the GCR between 2011 and 2021 and provided tumor samples.
The researchers are taking a “multi-omics” approach by sequencing the whole genome, whole exome, and transcriptome from each sample. Using bioinformatics, the research team sifts through raw sequencing data to extract highly valuable and informative characteristics of gastric tumors. These features are available to the biomedical research community through the GCR Genome Explorer.