(1382-C) The Darwin Tree of Life project: Achieving large-scale whole genome sequencing through automated library construction at the Wellcome Sanger Institute
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
Location: Exhibit Halls AB
Abstract: The Wellcome Sanger Institute (WSI) is a world leader in genome research that delivers insights into human, evolutionary and pathogen biology. To deliver the Institute’s scientific goals the WSI generates high-quality data through the translation of ambitious experimental ideas into high-throughput automated pipelines.
A flagship programme is the Darwin Tree of Life (DToL), which aims to generate platinum standard reference genomes of the estimated 70,000 eukaryotic species in Britain and Ireland. This initiative aims to advance our understanding of life on Earth by unravelling the genetic blueprints of a wide range of organisms.
To address the scale of this challenge, the WSI is evaluating robust automated solutions to enable the generation of long-read next-generation libraries. Here we describe the development and validation of a novel automated method on SPT Labtech’s firefly® liquid handling platform to construct whole genome sequencing (WGS) libraries from genomic DNA using the PacBio SMRTbell prep kit 3.0 (SPK3). Libraries were subsequently sequenced on PacBio’s fleet of long-read systems. We will show how we established that firefly was a viable platform, and will demonstrate how the prep on firefly performed relative to a non-automated prep when processing DNA from a test panel composed of 8 different phylogenetically diverse species.