Behind the scenes at our biobank

Your blood samples go on a surprisingly complex journey to be part of our biobank.

As you know, we collected two tubes when you agreed to be part of the biobank. One with a purple cap and one with a yellow cap. This tells our processing team they need to be treated differently.

First, we separate each sample into serum, plasma and white cell concentrates (called ‘buffy coat’) and freeze them at -80 degrees Celsius. This means your samples are available for future research projects.

The buffy coats get some more special treatment to support genomics research projects (that’s research related to the structure, function and interactions of genes). Batches of buffy coat samples are thawed so we can extract DNA, and freeze it again, ready for use in future genomic studies.

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