New England Biolabs has added a new extraction kit to its nucleic acid purification portfolio that uses a process based on magnetic beads to extract viral RNA and DNA. The new Monarch Mag Viral DNA/RNA Extraction Kit enhances recovery of low amounts of viral nucleic acid to enable highly sensitive detection.
“Isolating viral nucleic acids is crucial for several areas of life sciences research, including viral genome sequencing, infectious disease detection, and wastewater surveillance,” said James Deng, senior product marketing manager for NEB’s nucleic acid purification product line. “These methods require high sensitivity to detect the canonically low amount of virus in a sample, and high throughput to meet the demands of infectious disease testing and surveillance.”
“We’ve addressed these challenges with a viral nucleic acid purification kit that enables some of the highest sensitivity in detection commercially available, which we’ve tested with a wide range of virus types. We have also designed the kit for hands-free use on various automated instrument platforms to enable more flexibility and versatility,” stated Anagha Kadam, applications & product development scientist at NEB.
Using the company’s magnetic bead-based process to extract viral RNA and DNA reproducibly and efficiently, it enables scale up for high-throughput automation. The kit is compatible with the most common sample types for extracting viral nucleic acids including saliva, respiratory swab samples and, following an enrichment step, wastewater samples.
Highly-sensitive detection, following extraction of viral nucleic acid in samples containing few target molecules, is achieved through a combination of a magnetic bead-based method, an optimized buffer chemistry and a simplified extraction procedure, in which carrier RNA is utilized as a co-precipitant to enhance the recovery of low amounts of viral nucleic acid. Furthermore, customers can elute the purified RNA in low elution volumes, making the kit a desirable choice for various downstream applications.
In contrast to spin column-based nucleic acid purification methods, the bead-based technology offers researchers greater scalability and flexibility in moving from manual processing of viral samples to a hands-free, automatable approach. The kit works on a variety of automation instrument platforms, allowing researchers the flexibility to use their preferred workflows and instrumentations, including the company’s KingFisher Flex magnetic particle processor, and the Agilent Bravo and MGISP liquid handler platforms.
Based in Ipswich, Massachusetts and established in the mid 1970’s, NEB specializes in the discovery and production of enzymes for molecular biology applications, producing a large selection of recombinant and native enzymes for genomic research. For more info, see www.neb.com.
