Have you ever walked on a beach and noticed that the waves seem to glow as they roll onto shore? Perhaps you have seen fish or jellyfish that glow in the dark, or maybe you’ve chased fireflies in your backyard or on a camping trip. These are all forms of luminescence (the production of light without adding heat), but the manner that these organisms produce their light can be quite different.
Continue reading “Surfing the Light Waves: Shrimp, Coral, Turtles and Other Fluorescent Organisms”This is the third post in a series of blogs on quantitation for NGS applications written by guest blogger Adam Blatter, Product Specialist in Integrated Solutions at Promega.
Fluorescent dye-based quantitation uses specially designed DNA binding compounds that intercalate only with double stranded DNA molecules. When excited by a specific wavelength of light, only dye in the DNA-bound state will fluoresce. These aspects of the technique contribute to low background signal, and therefore the ability to accurately and specifically detect very low quantities of DNA in solution, even the nanogram quantities used in NGS applications.
For commercial NGS systems, such as the Nextera Rapid Capture Enrichment Protocol by Illumina, this specificity and sensitivity of quantitation are critical. The Nextera protocol is optimized for 50ng of total genomic DNA. A higher mass input of genomic DNA can result in incomplete tagmentation, and larger insert sizes, which can adversely affect enrichment. A lower mass input of genomic DNA or low-quality DNA can generate smaller than expected inserts, which can be lost during subsequent cleanup steps, giving lower diversity of inserts.
Continue reading “Fluorescence Dye-Based Quantitation: Sensitive and Specific for NGS Applications”