Infectious Diseases & ARTIC Sequencing

Next generation sequencing (NGS) has revolutionized the study of infectious diseases, providing detailed insights into pathogen genomics, transmission dynamics, and outbreak management. For over 15 years, NEBNext^® has been supporting researchers, vaccine developers, molecular diagnostics companies, and public health labs with high-quality, reliable library prep solutions for a range of NGS platforms and throughputs. When accuracy and speed matter most, like during an evolving public health threat, NEBNext reagents and tools are ready to help!

Rapidly evolving infectious disease threats and the public health response to them are, perhaps, the most important examples of how a robust next generation sequencing (NGS) capacity is an essential element of a comprehensive infectious disease-preparedness plan. Public health labs, core labs, and individual research and development (R&D) teams must be able to quickly and definitively identify an outbreak's causative microbe with sequencing, develop point-of-care testing solutions, and watchfully monitor for novel mutations. NEB’s Primer Monitor Tool enables ongoing surveillance of new sequence variants that impact sequencing-primer binding in SARS-CoV-2 and RSV (A/B).

Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) Sequencing:

NEB development scientists developed a set of primers for use in RT-PCR upstream of library prep for sequencing on either Illumina or Oxford Nanopore Technologies sequencers. Compatible with samples of known (RSV A and/or RSV B) or unknown subtype, the NEBNext RSV Primer Module (NEB #E9642) enables detection of strain-specific sequence information, when used in combination with other NEB reagents. The NEB’s Primer Monitor Tool enables easy monitoring of variants that impact primer regions that could lead to RSV sequencing read dropouts. Learn more about how NEBNext supports RSV sequencing.

Influenza (Flu) Sequencing:

Responding to a need for well-designed, balanced indexing primers for RT-PCR and library prep upstream of Oxford Nanopore Technologies sequencing, NEB scientists developed a set of primers for integrated-indexing, multi-segment (iiMS) PCR. Details are available in the open-source protocol currently available on protocols.io, based on work in Peter Thielen’s lab at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Data from NEB scientists support the use of these primers in the isolation and sequencing of Influenza A subtype H5N1 from milk. Learn more about the NEBNext iiMS Influenza A primer pairs.

Severe, Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Sequencing:

Supporting the fight against COVID-19, NEBNext^® scientists developed a suite of NGS library prep products based on the ARTIC Network’s SARS-CoV-2 sequencing protocol (Quick, J (2020) nCoV-2019 sequencing protocol v2 (GunIt). Library prep kits were made available for SARS-CoV-2 sequencing on Illumina^® (with and without in-built enzymatic fragmentation, and Oxford Nanopore Technologies^® platforms, for broad applicability with existing sequencing infrastructure. The product development and bioinformatics teams at NEB continues to track new variants with its NEB Primer Monitor to ensure that the available sequencing primers were optimized and updated for new variants as they were established. Learn more about NEBNext reagents for SARS-CoV-2 sequencing.

Learn more about how New England Biolabs (NEB) supported SARS-CoV-2 sequencing with their range of NGS library prep reagents at the Sequencing and COVID-19 page.

For details on New England Biolabs’ complete offering for infectious disease R&D, refer to Supporting Infectious Disease Research and Development.

For details on how the NEBNext ARTIC products, based on the original work of the ARTIC Network, are designed for reliable, accurate, and fast sequencing of SARS-CoV-2, visit NEBNext^® ARTIC product for SARS-CoV-2 sequencing.