The University of California, Davis three-year effort to establish itself and the Sacramento region as a hub for genetic testing on the West Coast took a step forward last week with the opening of universitys new genomic testing facility in Sacramento.

Once its fully operational, the center is expected to conduct high-level genetic sequencing to advance the universitys research in the realms of medicine and agricultural science.

A genome is a collection of all the genes in an organism. The human genome, for example, has about three billion genetic characters. In genetic sequencing, a genetic sample is tested to determine an organisms DNA sequence. Knowing this helps researchers identify genetic mutations, which in some cases cause cancer.

UC Davis new genetic testing facility, housed at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, is opening in partnership with BGI, a Chinese company founded in 1999 that is now the largest genomic sequencing firm in the world. The opening of the center coincided with Sacramento hosting the International Conference on Genomics in the Americas, which ended Friday and drew 45 genomics experts to the California capital.

Within a month, a staff of 30 will be doing genetic testing at the facility in the medical centers UC Davis Institute of Regenerative Cures building, said Harris Lewin, vice chancellor of research at UC Davis. Most of those workers will from China.

But, within the year the genomics center will employ roughly 200, and is expected to drive genomics testing business to the region, Lewin said. What were going to have here with this facility is one of the largest genome sequencing facilities in the state ... and in the span of a few months I believe we could be among the top 10 sequencing facilities in the world, he said.

Presently, only three such centers exist in the U.S., one at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., another at Baylor University in Texas and the third the Broad Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lewin said.

Under the collaboration between UC Davis and BGI, the company will pay rent to the university for use of the building space. In turn, the university will get discounted rates for whatever sequencing projects it does on BGIs expensive and technologically advanced machines.

Getting the building ready for the new center demanded an $8 million dollar investment from UC Davis. BGI has invested $10 million in sequencing equipment, Lewin said.

The sequencing prowess of the new center will vastly outpace what can be done presently at the universitys existing genomic center, officials said.

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UC Davis hopes to become genomics leader with new testing center

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