Microbial Community Analysis

We offer services to profile a range of microbial community compositions:

1. 16SV4 Kozich - Our standard 16SV4 protocol (Kozich et al., 2013) targets and amplifies the V4 region of bacterial and archaeal 16S rRNA-encoding genes.
2. 16SV4 EMP - A  modified set of primers by the Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) that also targets the V4 region but with added degeneracies to be more inclusive of bacterial and archaeal species found in some environments (Walters et al., 2015).
3. Fungal ITS1 - This primer set is also utilised by the Earth Microbiome Project and targets the fungal internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1) region (Walters et al., 2015). The ITS1 primers used by our lab are ITS1F and ITS2.
4. Fungal ITS2 - These primers target the fungal internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region for amplification of a broad spectrum of fungal taxa in complex microbial communities (Taylor et al., 2016).  The ITS2 primers used by our lab are 5.8S-Fun and ITS4-Fun.

Community profiling can occur on purified DNA samples from a variety of sources, including blood, stool, tissue, saliva and soil. Please see our Nucleic Acid Extraction service if you would like us to isolate the DNA from specimens before library prep. Libraries are cleaned, normalized, and undergo quality control before sequencing on the Illumina MiSeq platform. Clients have the option to run combined community analysis for characterizing fungal and bacterial composition in their sample sets. Output data of FASTQ files can be returned to our clients via Dropbox. Clients can also request data be transferred using Illumina’s BaseSpace Sequence Hub. 

We accept samples in a 96-well plate format, with up to 94 samples and 2 blank wells per controls. 

If you are ready to submit samples for community profiling, we process all submissions through our MiCores website.

To learn more, please refer to the Frequently Asked Questions below, or reach out to us at [email protected].

Sample Plate Map

Shipping Plates to Our Core