Microbiome Profiling with Sensitivity, Speed and Scale

Few subjects have generated more hope (or garnered more hype) than the human microbiome. And it’s easy to see why – we’re in the midst of a microbiome revolution.

The advent of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies unlocked the ability to comprehensively survey our resident microorganisms and radically changed our understanding of their impacts on human health.

However, despite the progress enabled by NGS and its ongoing utility, all too often sequencing

gives us too much data yet leaves us wanting more.

When more still isn’t enough: the hidden costs of sequencing

Sequencing comes with all sorts of headaches that aren’t advertised.

16S amplicon sequencing can provide a coarse overview of your samples, but it usually can’t distinguish closely related microorganisms.

Shotgun metagenomic sequencing provides greater taxonomic resolution and functional profiling, but it also requires long turnaround times, complex bioinformatics pipelines and often provides far more information than what’s needed to answer your question. 

Furthermore, if you’re looking to track rare microbes, poor limits of detection may not capture what you need. In many sample types (saliva, skin, etc.) this issue is made worse when the bulk of your sequences come from the host and are immediately thrown away.

All too often we’re left paying too high a price for superfluous data only capable of revealing the tip of the microbiome iceberg.

Rightsizing your research: qPCR is sensitive, speedy, and scalable

On the other hand, qPCR is highly specific and sensitive to pre-designed targets – capable of accurately quantifying target organisms down to single-digit copy numbers within complex samples. 

What’s more, with qPCR you can obtain absolute abundance in under an hour without complicated bioinformatics analysis.

Targeted qPCR allows you to quantify your microbes of interest with superior limits of detection at a fraction of the cost. These technological advantages and cost savings enable larger studies with near real-time data to monitor therapeutic response, validate biomarkers, and diagnose disease.

Delivering qPCR-based microbiome profiling: the right tool for the job

We started Branchpoint Biosciences because qPCR delivers better data, faster, for less.

We’re here to enable your microbiome research with an ever-expanding portfolio of validated species-specific qPCR assays and custom assay design.

Stay tuned for our next post where we’ll share more about how we design and validate our qPCR assays to ensure target specificity and accurate quantification within complex microbiome samples.