New England Biolabs® Launches NEBNext Direct® Custom Ready Panels for Efficient Targeted Re-sequencing

IPSWICH, Mass., July 10, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- New England Biolabs (NEB^®) today announced the launch of the NEBNext Direct Custom Ready Panels. The new panels ? coupled with the proprietary NEBNext Direct target enrichment technology ? enable the rapid development and deployment of a customized target enrichment panel by allowing users to select from an extensive library of genes to produce sequencing data with high specificity and coverage uniformity.

"Targeted next generation sequencing panels for genomic profiling are generally plagued by design difficulty and high cost due to the wide variation in interrogated genes that are specific to a given study," said Andrew Barry, Product Marketing Manager, Target Enrichment at NEB.

"As a result, we developed a library of pre-synthesized 'baits' that are optimized and specific to the full exonic content of ~850 genes associated with a range of human diseases, which can be readily combined into customized panels," said Barry. "Not only does this give researchers more freedom in panel design, but also it allows them to simply and quickly do more meaningful work with clinically relevant samples."

According to Dr. Guang Peng, M.D., Ph.D. of MD Anderson Cancer Center, "NEBNext Direct Custom Ready Panels have allowed my research to focus on the specific genes we need to explore. In addition to the convenience of easily selecting genes for focused panels, NEBNext Direct enrichment has provided the necessary reliability and depth of coverage to enable robust somatic variant calling."

NEBNext Direct Custom Ready Panels employ the NEBNext Direct target enrichment technology, which balances the speed and precision of multiplexed PCR-based approaches with the content scalability of hybridization-based methods. The approach rapidly hybridizes both strands of genomic DNA with biotinylated probes prior to streptavidin bead capture, enzymatic removal of off-target sequences, and conversion of captured molecules into sequence-ready libraries. A unique molecular identifier tags each individual molecule prior to the final PCR amplification to enable identification of PCR duplicates, and barcodes are added to each library during PCR for high-throughput pooling.

For more information about NEBNext Direct Custom Ready Panels, please visit www.neb.com/E6631.

About New England Biolabs
Established in the mid 1970's, New England Biolabs, Inc. (NEB) is the industry leader in the discovery and production of enzymes for molecular biology applications and now offers the largest selection of recombinant and native enzymes for genomic research. NEB continues to expand its product offerings into areas related to PCR, gene expression, sample preparation for next generation sequencing, synthetic biology, glycobiology, epigenetics and RNA analysis. Additionally, NEB is focused on strengthening alliances that enable new technologies to reach key market sectors, including molecular diagnostics development. New England Biolabs is a privately held company, headquartered in Ipswich, MA, and has extensive worldwide distribution through a network of exclusive distributors, agents and seven subsidiaries located in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the UK. For more information about New England Biolabs visit www.neb.com.

NEB®, NEW ENGLAND BIOLABS®, NEBNEXT® and NEBNEXT DIRECT® are registered trademarks of New England Biolabs, Inc.

SOURCE New England Biolabs, Inc.