ArcticZymes has entered into a supply and distribution agreement with Chinese precision medicine company Jiangsu Simcere Diagnostics. HL-SAN will be used in development and manufacturing of Simsere’s infectious disease metagenomic assays.
In metagenomic sequencing, all DNA in the sample is sequenced. In clinical samples, the amount of DNA from the patient far outweighs the amount of DNA from pathogens. This leads to background noise, which reduces the performance of the assay. To achieve more sensitive assays, different strategies are employed to remove host DNA from the sample. One such strategy, is to digest host DNA with a nuclease before the pathogen DNA is released. High salt is beneficial at this stage, as this makes the host DNA more accessible for the nuclease. HL-SAN works well in this workflow since it is very active at elevated salt concentrations.
The full press release can be found here.
A paper describing the use of HL-SAN in a metagenomic diagnostic workflow can be found here. An open access preprint of this paper can be found here.