NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Eppendorf North America announced it is collaborating with Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Colorado at Boulder to develop automated protocols for DNA extraction and library preparation workflows.
The development work will be based on environmental samples using Eppendorf's epMotion automated pipetting system. Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, and the University of Colorado are the pilot laboratories working on the Earth Microbiome Project, a multidisciplinary project to analyze microbial communities worldwide.
Financial and other terms of the collaboration were not disclosed.
According to EMP's website, members of the project will analyze 200,000 samples using metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and amplicon sequencing to create a gene atlas comprising about 500,000 reconstructed microbial genomes, a global metabolic model, and a data analysis portal for visualization of all information.