Facility & Resources

Rock Hall
Sam S. Oh

The Burchard Lab is a contemporary 3,000-square-foot facility located at the UC San Francisco Mission Bay campus, within the School of Medicine’s Lung Biology Center in Rock Hall. UCSF Mission Bay, where the first research building opened in 2003, has steadily evolved into a dynamic research campus that will soon welcome a new addition to UCSF Health with the opening of a 869,000 square foot children’s, women’s, and cancer hospital complex adjacent to UCSF research buildings and their facilities.

The Burchard Lab is fully operational for:

  • Novel SNP detection
  • DNA processing and storage
  • High-throughput genotyping
  • Next-generation sequencing
  • Immunodiagnostic testing
  • Clinical recruitment
  • Statistical genetic analyses
  • Bioinformatics
  • High-performance computing

Genetic resources developed by the lab

The Burchard Lab has built the largest gene-environment study of asthma in minority children in the United States (total sample n = 9,744). We have amassed detailed data on social, environmental, and biologic risk factors for asthma, as well as detailed information on medical history and drug response. We pride ourselves on having a “one-stop shop.” Specifically, we recruit our own patients and we generate and analyze our own genetic data.

biosamples
Sam S. Oh

GALA & SAGE Treasury

We established the GALA & SAGE Treasury to facilitate asthma genetic research and provide open access to the databank and biological specimens at cost for worthy and collaborative projects. In addition, we can assist investigators with use of the data in the Treasury, including statistical analysis.

lab equipment
Sam S. Oh

Genetic testing and analysis

We also offer collaborating investigators full-service genetic testing and analyses. Specifically, we analyze promising candidate genes identified by investigators using biologic material (DNA and plasma) from large, well-phenotyped, family-based and case-control asthma studies of racially/ethnically diverse subjects.

Access to other facilities

Through association with the UCSF Institute for Human Genetics, Burchard Lab members have access to the Genomics Core Facilities (GCF). The GCF specializes in mid-to high-throughput quantitative PCR, SNP, epigenetic, and sequence analyses using a variety of state-of-the-art platforms.

Burchard Lab members also have access to the Tobacco Biomarkers Core Facility within the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. This facility serves as an analytical chemistry resource for the UCSF tobacco control and cancer research communities, and has analyzed biological samples in support of clinical research studies of tobacco pharmacology and toxicology for more than 30 years. It has the capability to examine large numbers of samples, typically analyzing about 10,000 samples per year.

In-house computational resources

The Burchard Lab performs all its own bioinformatic and statistical analyses using local servers and shared Linux-based high-performance computer clusters.

Sam Oh reviewing data on a computer screen
Joshua Galanter