In July 2019, the Agricultural Product Safety and Environmental Quality Testing Centre of the Institute of Applied Ecology (IAE), Chinese Academy of Sciences started to establish a biological sequencing platform to meet the needs of IAE scientists for conducting microbial gene sequencing. The latest news is that the centre has now equipped a set of high-throughput sequencer (Illumina Miseq) and peripheral instruments.

This gene sequencer, with high performance of targeted sequencing (15 Gb data, 25 M reads, 2 × 300 bp read length), is currently one of the most cost-effective amplicon sequencing solutions. The supporting instruments includes an Agilent bioanalyzer (Agilent 2100), fluorescence quantifier (Qubit 3.0), a PCR machine (Mastercycler X50h), etc. The sequencer can perform nucleic acid sample preparation, rapid library construction, and library quality evaluation.

The sequencing platform has been put into use since the end of November 2019. As of June, more than 1,000 soil and litter samples have been sent to this centre. The sequencing platform has completed the database construction and sequencing of targeted bacterial 16s rRNA genes (V4, V3-V4 regions) and fungal ITS genes (ITS1, ITS2 regions) and the related data analyses and debugging. The development of customised service for functional gene diversity analysis is proceeding in an orderly manner.