Invitrogen has announced the introduction of two reagent solutions to simplify genomic and transcriptome analysis on high-throughput genomic analysis platforms.
The Ribominus kit and the E-Gel Sizeselect two per cent pre-cast agarose gels simplify the workflows and reduce the experimental time and cost of applications, said Invitrogen.
The Ribominus for RNA-sequencing kits are available in two configurations: a universal kit for eukaryotes and a more specialised kit for plants.
They are used for the enrichment of RNA for whole transcriptome analysis for ribonucleic acid sequencing or RNA-sequencing applications.
The kit enables the depletion of large ribosomal RNA, the most abundant RNA in the transcriptome, by using oligonucleotide probes containing locking nucleic acids and magnetic bead separation technology.
The ability to deplete the ribosomal RNA is significant because the abundant RNAs often mask the messenger RNAs that play an influential role in gene expression, which may affect the detection of novel RNA transcripts within a cell.
For example, scientists may use the Ribominus kit to discover low abundance RNA sequences associated with human disease, as well as in agricultural systems that help determine the factors involved in drought and pest resistance.
The E-Gel Sizeselect two per cent pre-cast agarose gels are designed to simplify the separation and recovery of nucleic acid fragments of less than 1,000 base pairs for short read fragment library construction.
For most next-generation sequencing platforms, the nucleic acid strands need to be broken into smaller fragments of specific size ranges to efficiently sequence templates in applications.
E-Gel Sizeselect two per cent system reduces the time needed to complete this step from hours to less than 15 minutes without any need for further purification.
The E-Gel system has been used in fragment and mate-pair/paired end library construction on the Applied Biosystems Solid system and the Illumina genome analyser.
Dr Jim Knowles, professor and associate chair for research psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the University of Southern California's Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute at the Keck School of Medicine is using the E-Gel Sizeselect two per cent system for the discovery of genetic factors that predispose individuals to psychiatric illnesses.
His research team is focusing on projects including panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, nicotine addiction, opiate addiction, major depression and pulmonary arterial hypertension.
