Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We have been developing a high throughput 454 library construction process at the Joint Genome Institute to meet the needs of de novo sequencing a large number of microbial and eukaryote genomes, EST, and metagenome projects. We have been focusing efforts in three areas: (1) modifying the current process to allow the construction of 454 standard libraries on a 96-well format; (2) developing a robotic platform to perform the 454 library construction; and (3) designing molecular barcodes to allow pooling and sorting of many different samples. In the development of a high throughput process to scale up the number of libraries by adapting the process to a 96-well plate format, the key process change involves the replacement of gel electrophoresis for size selection with Solid Phase Reversible Immobilization (SPRI) beads. Although the standard deviation of the insert sizes increases, the overall quality sequence and distribution of the reads in the genome has not changed. The manual process of constructing 454 shotgun libraries on 96-well plates is a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and ergonomically hazardous process; we have been experimenting to program a BioMek robot to perform the library construction. This will not only enable library construction to be completed in a single day, but will also minimize any ergonomic risk. In addition, we have implemented a set of molecular barcodes (AKA Multiple Identifiers or MID) and a pooling process that allows us to sequence many targets simultaneously. Here we will present the testing of pooling a set of selected fosmids derived from the endomycorrhizal fungus Glomus intraradices. By combining the robotic library construction process and the use of molecular barcodes, it is now possible to sequence hundreds of fosmids that represent a minimal tiling path of this genome. Here we present the progress and the challenges of developing these scaled-up processes.