Life Technologies’ Invitrogen has launched its RiboMinus kit for RNA sequencing and E-Gel SizeSelect 2 percent pre-cast agarose gels, which it claims can simplify genomic and transcriptome analysis on second-generation high-throughput genomic-analysis platforms. Both products are compatible with several sequencing systems, including Life Technologies’ SOLiD, Illumina’s Genome Analyzer, and Roche’s Genome Sequencer FLX.
RiboMinus kits come in two configurations: a universal kit for eukaryotes and a more specialized kit for plants. The kits are used to enrich RNA for whole-transcriptome analysis for RNA sequencing and they help to remove large ribosomal RNA.
The E-Gel SizeSelect agarose gels are designed to separate and recover nucleic acid fragments of less than a kilobase for short-read fragment library construction. The gels perform this step in less than 15 minutes without the need for further purification, according to the company, and have been used to construct fragment and mate-pair/paired end libraries for the SOLiD and the Genome Analyzer.