Frequently Asked Questions About Our Products And Services

Depending on your choice of target regions, all bacterial, archeal and fungal species of which a sequence is published in the NCBI nucleotide database can be identified. There are currently for example thousands of bacterial species with sequence entries in the database. Closely related species with almost identical DNA sequences will not be discriminated and only the genus (or the family) will be reported.

• Closely related species are not distinguishable because of sequence identity.
• Degradation of bacterial DNA may occur in highly processed samples or samples with low pH - a species identification is therefore difficult and sometimes not possible.
• The more starting material we receive, the higher the probability to get excellent sequencing results.

• Samples with strongly degraded DNA will give the result “no species identification possible”. To avoid false-positive results, a negative control (water) is always co-analysed with the samples.
• With NGS all DNA amplicons that were successfully amplified from the sample DNA will be detected. Due to the high sensitivity of the method, sequences with low presence in the sequence pool or sequences with unexpected sequence lengths have to be removed from the data analysis during the bioinformatical workflow in order to exclude false-positives due to PCR and/or sequencing errors. Species with a fraction below 0.5 % of all assigned reads are not reported.

For bacterial profiling please choose at least on 16S target, for fungal profiling at least one ITS target. For taxonomic profiling or archea please selcet our archeal 16S target.

As each primer set fails to amplify certain species we recommend that you carefully check the literature available about the limitations of each primer set. It is recommended to use multiple primer combinations to capture the entire community (e.g. Ihrmark et al., 2012; Toju et al., 2012).

No. Our standard primer sets are not to be used for detection of cyanobacteria. If this is your aim, please inquire for an individual project.

We use the amplicon generation process as the entry quality control. Even though the PCR conditions are optimized the success of the amplicon generation depends on the amount of bacterial, archaeal or fungal DNA in the sample. In case we can not generate an amplicon or only a very week amplicon this is a strong indication that the content was too low. By default we will repeat the amplicon generation once with modified conditions. 

In case no amplicon can be generated, we will stop processing of those samples and reimburse you for the sequencing part that was not performed. In the event that only a weak amplicon can be generated, Eurofins Genomics will include those amplicons in the amplicon pool for sequencing, too. Experience shows that those amplicons will result in very few reads only and interpretation of those reads should be done with special care.