The wet biobank is located on the basement floor of Building 8 of Wuhan University School of Medicine. The first phase covers an area of 440 square meters and has 10 full-time staff members. The wet biobank is the core department of Human Genetics Resource Preservation Center of Hubei Province, which is responsible for the important functions of sample pre-treatment and preservation. In October 2017, the Human Genetic Resources Management Office of China approved the sample storage qualification of the wet biobank, with a storage capacity of 3 million samples, including blood, urine, tissue, DNA, RNA, etc. After the approval of the storage qualification, the wet biobank carried out a variety of sample collection and storage work. As of December 31, 2018, 158,066 samples had been stored, which not only preserved samples for more than 10 clinical departments, but also undertook the preservation of samples for the Hubei Province Neonatal Deafness Genetic Screening Project.
The wet storage adopts the third-generation automation design concept, and has purchased the most advanced international complete set of biological sample storage automation equipment (outdoor liquid nitrogen tower, automatic vapor phase liquid nitrogen storage system, automatic blood packaging and nucleic acid extraction instrument, program freezing and cooling platform, automatic immunohistochemical staining platform, etc.) to achieve maximum automation of sample operation. The research service platform equipment equipped includes: third-generation gene sequencer, digital pathological section scanning equipment, laser confocal microscope, high-performance liquid mass spectrometer, micro laser cutting instrument, biological analyzer, in vitro microvascular tension measuring instrument, etc., with biological samples and information collection, processing, preservation, quality management and other related sample science and technology, can fully support the research of various related projects.
Currently, the sample types mainly include blood, urine, and tissue.