CoreBiome, a genomics company offering innovative solutions for microbiome discovery, have announced new $99 shotgun metagenomic and strain sequencing tests. These new services provide affordable, high-quality species and gene profiling for the human microbiome, and deep characterization of microbial isolate libraries.

“There is a major information gap in microbiome R&D, because people use amplicon sequencing for microbiome profiling, which fails to provide high-resolution profiles of genes and species,” says CoreBiome CEO, Dan Knights. “A higher-resolution approach – metagenomic shotgun sequencing – has been unaffordable until now. Seeing this gap, we have invested enormous effort into optimizing wet lab methods and informatics in order to make high-quality, affordable shotgun sequencing available to the entire microbiome R&D community.” CoreBiome’s informatics pipeline employs a novel, completely optimal DNA-alignment based database search algorithm, a first for large genome databases.

BoosterShot™ -- CoreBiome’s shotgun offering -- starts at a sequencing depth of 2 million sequences per sample, with a turnaround time of 3 weeks from sample arrival to delivery of a sophisticated and interactive online report, as well as raw data. “Our goal with BoosterShot is to allow researchers in industry and academia to run large, dense, longitudinal studies of the human microbiome using shotgun sequencing right off the bat,” said CoreBiome’s Chief Scientific Officer, Daryl Gohl. This offering complements CoreBiome’s BenchMark™ 16S/ITS sequencing assay, which is useful for samples such as tissue biopsies and plant tissue where there is a high level of non-bacterial DNA present or where the species are not well represented in databases.

CoreBiome is also announcing a second new service, StrainView™, for whole-genome-shotgun sequencing of hundreds or thousands of isolated bacterial genomes at a time. “We realized that we could use the technologies developed for BoosterShot to also provide fast $99 whole-genome-shotgun sequencing of bacterial isolates. We combined this approach with optimal informatics search tools to provide comprehensive visualizations of what is similar between every pair of genomes in a strain library,” said Chief Operating Officer, Kenny Beckman. “We think this will be extremely useful to researchers who have large strain banks, but no effective way to compare the genome content all of the strains.”

CoreBiome will be demonstrating BoosterShot™ and StrainView™ at the upcoming Microbiome Movement Drug Development Summit this June in Boston, Massachusetts, and at the 6TH ASM Conference on Beneficial Microbes this July in Madison, Wisconsin. Both services are currently available.

Visit www.corebiome.com