Agilent Technologies Inc. has introduced a new product designed to address key challenges that laboratories encounter when preparing DNA sequencing libraries for their research.

The new Agilent SureSelect XT HS2 DNA Kit aims at offering researchers a complete solution that allows them to choose workflow options that best suit their needs.

Advantages of the new kit include:

• The ability to multiplex hundreds of samples in one sequencing run, which reduces sequencing costs for high-throughput labs.
• The ability to remove sample contamination as a result of index hopping from reads.
• Better error correction to detect variants with low allele frequencies (particularly important in cancer applications where the samples are often of varying tumor purity).
• The option to purchase Solid Phase Reversible Immobilization (SPRI) beads and streptavidin beads as part of a complete kit.

Zarko Manojlovic, Director of the Keck Genomics Platform (KGP) said, “Agilent’s new SureSelect XT HS2 kit will help us accelerate our capture-based enrichment library preparation, without sacrificing quality. Since most of our work is focused on the processing of highly degraded samples, the integrated and modular XT HS2 protocol truly provides us the flexibility to adjust on a per-sample basis within a high-throughput processing integration. This empowers us to create robust sample preparation pipelines to push the boundaries of processing precious low-quantity and poor quality samples in an integrated and efficient way.”

Lou Welebob, vice president of Commercial Marketing, Diagnostics and Genomics Group at Agilent said, “The release of SureSelect XT HS2 demonstrates Agilent’s decade long commitment to innovation of our SureSelect brand to ensure that customers have access to the most comprehensive and cutting-edge solutions for NGS library preparation. We continue to evolve in order to satisfy our customer’s unmet needs for cancer and constitutional applications.”

KGP is a service platform designed to support the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California to provide high-throughput, end-to-end next-generation sequencing services to promote translation of the hidden secrets of genomics into clinically relevant discovery and drive cutting-edge improvements in human health.