Selected category: Freedom EVO

By Hannah van Schijndel (Artemis) and Dajana Domik (Tecan)

It is estimated that up to 20% of the world’s population may have some degree of food intolerance, which can manifest itself in pathologies such as celiac disease, dermatitis, atopic eczema, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and irritable bowel syndrome IBS.¹ We established in our previous article that IgG and IgG4-based ELISA testing can be used to reduce the guesswork in identifying food sensitivities, and is indeed the most widely used immunological method, despite the major challenges associated with it. ^2-5

By Beatrice Marg-Haufe

Written in collaboration with Zymo Research, Irvine, CA, USA.

Next-generation sequencing (NGS*) has revolutionized genomic research, allowing entire genomes to be sequenced in a single day. This has led to massive advances in the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of disease, answering genetic questions from a wide spectrum of applications and biological systems. Today, NGS is an essential tool for any biologist. Ultra-high throughput NGS solutions have a wide range of applications and are fully scalable—from rapid SNP genotyping of a single individual, to whole genome sequencing (WGS) of entire populations. The explosive demand for NGS often creates pressures upstream to process many more samples and prepare high quality DNA to feed into library prep and analysis. In this article we explore the ideal DNA requirements for NGS and look at some of the most critical parameters for developing an automated nucleic acid extraction workflow.

By Beatrice Marg-Haufe

Written in collaboration with Zymo Research, Irvine, CA, USA.

With the advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS), the field of metagenomics has exploded in recent years, as scientists are now able to study microbes as communities instead of individual organisms. This has revolutionized our understanding of the relationships between microbiota, human health, and the environment.