Clearing the plate: a strategic approach to mitigate well-to-well contamination in large-scale microbiome studies.

ABSTRACT: Large-scale studies are essential to answer questions about complex microbial communities that can be extremely dynamic across hosts, environments, and time points. However, managing acquisition, processing, and analysis of large numbers of samples poses many challenges, with cross-contamination being the biggest obstacle. Contamination complicates analysis and results in sample loss, leading to higher costs and constraints on mixed sample type study designs. While many researchers opt for 96-well plates for their workflows, these plates present a significant issue: the shared seal and weak separation between wells leads to well-to-well contamination. To address this concern, we propose an innovative high-throughput approach, termed as the Matrix method, which employs barcoded Matrix Tubes

SUBMITTER: Brennan C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11494942 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature