Standardization of High Throughput Livestock DNA Isolation and Quality Control for Genetic Testing

Genetic analysis of livestock samples requires high-quality DNA preparations which are often challenging and labor-intensive to produce. Blood, hair, semen, ear punches, saliva and swabs are all commonly used for analysis of a huge diversity of animal species. To allow swift processing and automation of DNA extraction, the one-size-fits-all LGC sbeadex™ livestock DNA isolation kit was optimized on both the Thermo KingFisher™ and LGC oKtopure™ liquid handling platforms creating an automation friendly approach, from livestock sample input, to DNA isolation, QC and normalization.

This approach allows extraction runs of livestock samples such as ear punches, blood, hair, saliva or semen to be done in parallel. As a QC tool, the Trinean DropSense™96 droplet plate reader was incorporated allowing 96-well droplet DNA quantification and simultaneous detection of any carry-over contaminant by its cDrop analytical software. Data from a large study will be shown, including DNA isolation from pig ears, cattle blood, cattle semen and fish fins while DNA yield and quality are checked by comparing different QC techniques. Overall, this new turn-key solution for automated livestock DNA isolation and QC ensures high quality DNA isolates in a high throughput, standardized manner suitable for all down-stream applications like genotyping, NGS and array technologies.