PrepGEM Bacteria 100

Targeted sequencing of a subset of genes or defined areas of a genome can be an effective approach to study only regions of interest of a particular study. This can save a lot of time and money and reduce unnecessary complexity. Targeted amplicon sequencing of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene, the most commonly used gene in microbial systematics, has been particularly instrumental in increasing our understanding of the dynamic nature of microbial populations and their impact on the environment and human health. This approach has streamlined the study of bacterial diversity from various habitats, allowing the characterization of microbiomes and bacteria that would be hard to study with conventional methods.
The ability to detect bacterial strains which are in low abundance in microbiomes can drastically impact the interpretation of microbiological changes. Isolation of total DNA is the key step to ensure the sample obtained is truly representative of the community as a whole and is of high-quality, high-purity, and as unbiased as possible. Due to the obvious heterogeneity of the environmental sample, it is difficult to lyse cells of all species with equal efficacy.
Traditional and currently available methods are too harsh on the sample resulting in possible physical damage to DNA. This is a particular issue with regard to recovery of DNA from low abundance species.
The prepGEM Bacteria kit uses a novel cocktail of mild buffers, MicroGEM’s aggressive thermophilic proteinase (prepGEM) and mesophilic lysozyme to gently but effectively lyse cells from both gram positive and negative bacteria from metagenomic samples. This gentle lysis process without any transfer steps ensure that the integrity of low abundance species is preserved.