Making Our Lifes Easier: NGS Goes Automatic

The standardization of Next Generation Sequencers, such as Illumina HiSeq2000 and MiSeq, for -omics studies and their growing output allows to sequence at the same time, in a single run, more and more samples of any kind. If we want to benefit from this very high throughput and the many related applications, we have to achieve a high multiplexing level, the bottleneck being the manual preparation of the librairies. Considering that a growing number of applications are available for genomics, transcriptomics and epigenetics, the challenge is to have an automated process adapted to any kind of studies and achieve a high multiplexing level.To achieve this goal, we developed at the INRA GeT-PlaGe facility an automated process to produce in parallel more librairies on an automated line composed by 3 TECAN liquid hanling robots: an EVO200 for pre PCR library preparation, an EVO150 for post PCR processing and pooling and a TECAN150 for library quantification. Currently, several protocols are completely automated allowing library preparation for Whole Genome sequencing, Rad-seq, Amplicon sequencing (e.g. 16S sequencing on MiSeq in metagenomic studies) and stranded RNA seq. Some applications such as Mate-Pair and Whole Genome Bisulfite sequencing are partially automated at the moment.