Twist Bioscience Corporation announced technology early access of the Twist Flex Prep Ultra High-Throughput (UHT) Kit, which aims to enable unparalleled throughput at a fraction of the cost of existing on market solutions, accelerating NGS? microarray conversion and adoption in agricultural genomics. Built upon enzymatic fragmentation library preparation, the Twist Flex Prep UHT Kit utilizes novel chemistry that accepts and self-normalizes a wide range of sample input amounts through a new proprietary Normalization By Ligation (NBL) technology.

This is crucial for researchers in AgBio who sequence thousands of samples of varying inputs and removes the need to manually normalize each one, saving significant time and costs. The kit also enables enhanced multiplexing by pooling samples early in the workflow so that researchers can process more samples without additional capital investment. The enhanced multiplexing further limits hands on time and saves researchers costs of reagents in downstream purification and indexing steps.

In addition, pooling samples significantly reduces cost and plastic waste from pipette tips and plates in high-throughput labs. Twist Flex Prep UHT Kit Workflow: The Twist Flex Prep UHT Kit workflow is purpose-built to streamline and massively scale up Twist?s established enzymatic fragmentation methods. The new NBL technology eliminates the need to measure quantity of each DNA sample and to perform time consuming concentration adjustment prior to library preparation, saving significant cost per sample.

Following fragmentation and adapter ligation of each sample in a plate, up to 48 samples are pooled together in a single tube. This pooling strategy results in a meaningful reduction in both volumes and costs of reagents required for subsequent beads purification and amplification steps. Libraries prepared from this kit can be leveraged to perform standard whole genome sequencing (WGS), target enrichment, or low-pass WGS with enrichment.

By combining up to 48 unique adapters from the Twist UHT Flex Prep Kit with Twist?s current high throughput Unique Dual Indexing (UDI) system, theoretical sample multiplexing can top more than 140,000. All plate and tube formats are optimized to ensure compatibility with key automation systems, a critical consideration for labs looking to streamline workflows and reduce hands-on time.