QIAGEN announced a collaboration with the McGill University Centre for Microbiome Research to support microbiome research activities and outcomes. The three-year partnership will further drive microbiome sciences - the study of a community of microorganisms that can be found living together in any environment, including the human body. It will focus on key areas such as DNA extraction from low microbial biomass samples and anaerobic culturing protocols.

The collaboration is expected to strengthen QIAGEN's presence in microbiome research across North America which represents a $1.8 billion market. It also will help to gain a deeper understanding of the needs of the scientific community for studying the function of vast microbial ecosystems and how they can be shaped to improve health and mitigate disease. QIAGEN will support the McGill Centre for Microbiome Research with reagents for research across a variety of microbiology and genomic processing workflows and contribute to joint research projects demonstrating the suitability of QIAGEN products for microbiome science.

The collaboration will also enable the McGill Centre for Micro biome Research to better train the next generation of scientists and to make microbiome research accessible to a wider range of scientific domains.