Second Genome's Microbial Profiling Service is your window into a missing piece of data - the microbial communities inhabiting the world around us. Our service will take you quickly from sample to insights, enabling you to identify novel microbial profiles of disease, treatment response, or environmental changes, without a huge laboratory and informatics investment. Our goal is to get you closer to applying your discoveries. We deliver results in weeks, not months or years. You get robust, high confidence results through a reproducible, standardized hybridization-based assay and easy-to-understand synthesis, rather than complex and time consuming raw data.

Our Services

Accomplishing in weeks what can take months or years with other technologies, our microbial profiling service includes experiment design support, nucleic acid isolation, assay processing, and full statistical analysis, with the generation of secure, web-accessible data reports. From start to finish, the planning, performance, and bioinformatics analysis for your project is overseen and guided by leading experts in the fields of microbial community analysis and study best practices. All samples are processed in a GLP-compliant laboratory to ensure the quality and integrity of the data.

Our Technology

Second Genome provides full-service microbiological analysis of any sample, utilizing the award-winning PhyloChip™ assay developed by Dr. Gary Andersen at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  The PhyloChip assay represents years of research and development resulting in what is now a mature technology capable of detailed measurements of microbial community dynamics in a high-throughput and reproducible manner.

The PhyloChip assay is a microarray-based method that identifies and measures the relative abundance of more than 59,000 individual microbial taxa in any sample. This approach relies on the analysis of the entire 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequence which is present in every bacterial genome but varies in a way that provides a fingerprint for specific microbial types.  The microarray-based hybridization approach ensures that measurements on important low abundance bacteria are not overwhelmed by commonplace, dominant microbial community members. Importantly, the platform also demonstrates the capabilities required to be considered for regulated applications with demonstrated high within-lab repeatability and between-lab reproducibility.