G42 Healthcare Biogenix Labs certified to use Oxford Nanopore to provide rapid, high-accuracy, low-cost SARS-CoV-2 sequencing for COVID-19 surveillance

At Arab Health in Dubai, Group 42 Healthcare (G42 Healthcare) announced the certification of their Biogenix Labs with Oxford Nanopore technology, to carry out rapid SARS-CoV-2 sequencing as a service, providing the fastest, high accuracy sequencing with system flexibility.

This certification will enable G42 to use Oxford Nanopore sequencing technology and the latest SARS-CoV-2 Sequencing Kit — the highly adaptable ARTIC Midnight Kit, which can be used for low-, medium-, and high-throughput, rapid sequencing — alongside the ARTIC Classic protocol, to provide a SARS-CoV-2 sequencing service in for the region.

You can read the full announcement here.

About ARTIC Classic

ARTIC Classic was the first SARS-CoV-2 nanopore sequencing protocol to be utilised and has been used by scientists around the world. The SARS-CoV-2 genome is amplified in ~400 bp fragments. This shorter length may help improve coverage for RNA samples that are likely to be degraded - for example, due to freeze-thaw cycles or storage at temperatures above -80°C.

About ARTIC Midnight

ARTIC Midnight is a simple, rapid method of sequencing SARS-CoV-2 genomes at low cost (as little as $9.55) per sample. The approach is highly flexible, allowing the on-demand sequencing of small numbers of samples or scaling up to high-throughput sequencing needs. Hands-on time is also minimal, facilitating automation. The SARS-CoV-2 genome is amplified in ~1,200 bp overlapping segments, making it more resilient to drop-out caused by mutations in the viral genome.

This recent paper from Ranasinghe et al., explains how nanopore sequencing and, particularly, the Midnight Kit ‘achieved higher coverage with a lower number of reads, generated less ambiguous bases and was significantly cheaper’ than alternative approaches.

Find out more about SARS-CoV-2 sequencing using nanopore technology.