NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Beckman Coulter Life Sciences today announced a deal with New England Biolabs focused on automated methods to improve processes and throughput in next-generation sequencing sample preparation.
Beckman Coulter, a Danaher business, will develop, distribute, and support automation for NEBNext sample prep reagent kits, while NEB will provide technical expertise on the reagents, chemistry, and protocols.
The partnership has resulted in the development of the currently available NEBNext Ultra Directional RNA, NEBNext Ultra DNA, including ChIP-Seq, for Illumina's platforms, and the NEBNext Fast DNA Fragmentation & Library Prep for sequencing on Thermo Fisher Scientific's Ion Torrent system. Slated for availability later this year are other methods such as NEBNext ribosomal RNA depletion and the NEBNext Small RNA reagent kits.
Optimized methods for the NEBNext kits are built on Beckman Coulter's Biomek liquid handling platforms and include methods to address a specific NEBNext protocol. Methods for automating Beckman Coulter's AMPure XP kit for DNA purification, the SPRIselect kit for high-throughput DNA size selection, and the qPCR setup and normalization process are also included in order to improve the overall workflows, Beckman Coulter said.
The first automated NEBNext methods were developed on the NGS configurations of the Biomek 4000 and the Biomek FX Dual Arm Multi 96 and Span 8 platforms in collaboration with researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, and the Genomics and Molecular Biology Shared Resource at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and the Norris Cotton Cancer Center. The methods create up to 96 sequence-ready libraries.
Also today, NEB also announced an NGS-based target enrichment deal with Directed Genomics.