The first capability involves bacterial population profiling for microbiome analyses. Recent studies show that humans harbor vast and diverse populations of microorganisms that are essential to life and health. Research is now focused on correlating health and disease to the composition and changes in an individual’s microbiome. With more than 1,000 publications in 2011, microbiome analysis is one of the fastest growing fields of investigation.
Current techniques for profiling the microbiome in a specimen are labor intensive and can take several weeks. Because Genome Sequence Scanning™ can rapidly detect and quantitate bacterial strains from complex samples, the technology has the potential to become a mainstay of microbiome research.
The second capability involves rapid, high-resolution strain typing. Molecular typing of bacteria is widely used to understand how differences in genomic profile correlate to phenotypic characteristics such as pathogenicity.
Current typing techniques such as pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) take several days and results are difficult to compare among different operators and laboratories. GSS enables high resolution typing to be performed in hours and with a consistent data format that allows genomic structures to be readily compared.
