SPRI beads (almost) for free!

A few weeks ago Kristin posted a nice blog entry on home made SPRI beads, which effectively replace the ridiculously expensive commercial AMPure beads. (Editor’s note: see this post at RLR for more about the AMPure beads). Dan already ordered the ingredients to make them in our lab as well, and when they all arrived I volunteered to prepare and test them. Following are some results. If you don’t feel like reading through the whole post, the bottom line is that they work very well, and that you are very welcome to use them (they are in an aluminium-wrapped Falcon tube in the fridge, with a white “SPRI beads” label).

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Ampure XP beads – DNA clean up and size selection (Dan E.)

Ampure XP magnetic beads have become popular for cleaning DNA from reactions and for size selecting DNA. WGS sequencing library preparation protocols, and the GBS protocol, involve one or more bead clean up steps. If you make next gen sequencing libraries you will use Ampure XP beads. Following is some basic information about them and my thoughts about using them, mainly for library preparations . . . Continue reading