First steps

Now that our crowdfunding campaign for the first stage of the Gila monster genome has successfully completed (Thank-you to all the backers!), what do we do now?

Transferring funds First, the money that's been donated will be transferred to a sponsored projects account at Arizona State University (this way it won't be considered taxable-income for me, but instead will go directly into an account intended solely for research). Experiment will send a check to our sponsored projects office who will then deposit it into the Gila monster project account.

 http://asufoundation.org/gilamonster 

This Gila monster sponsored project account at ASU (above) will be live and still able to accept donations if you know anyone who would like to support Gila monster research but wasn't able to contribute to our Experiment crowdfunding campaign.

Once the funds have been accepted into the account, we can then start to spend them! But, we don't want to spend anything without thinking very carefully about it.

Getting quotes We had our initial quotes that we used for the crowd-funding, but throughout this campaign we were contacted by many different people with very helpful suggestions for different sequencing facilities to use, various technologies, and the benefits/trade-offs to each of them.

So, our second step right now is to confirm which sequencing facility and what kind of depth of coverage to get, now that we know how much we raised. Each sequencing facility core has different options for available technology and pricing. There will be follow-up posts to give more background and overviews about the different technologies.

Sending samples Once we know where the samples will be going, and how they need to be prepared, we'll get the samples shipped off for sequencing.

DNA analysis Hopefully it should take just a few weeks for the sequencing, then we will get back some giant files and will begin the assembly! Thank you! Thank you for coming on this journey with us. We'll do our best to keep you updated as the project progresses, and are very happy to answer any questions you have about the project.

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Also, as we think about moving forward, here is the first draft of the Gila monster genome logo that I sketched.