About the session

Pathogen detection and surveillance have become a high priority in both healthcare and environmental settings for the safety of patients and the general public. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for strategies to identify and differentiate pathogen variants of concern. Municipalities employ NGS-based wastewater analysis to identify not only SARS-CoV-2 variants but also other viral and bacterial species as early alert systems of community health. In clinical settings where co-infections of two or more pathogens can complicate patient outcomes, such as with SARS-CoV-2 and influenza, microbial surveillance of patient areas may help circumvent disease outbreaks. Thus, there is a widespread need for targeted and sensitive variant detection through whole-genome characterization of a wide variety of microbial pathogens.

This session will discuss new probe-based NGS enrichment solutions. We’ll introduce our QIAseq xHYB Viral and Bacterial Panels, which use hybrid capture technology to provide high-sensitivity targeted whole-genome enrichment for detecting and sequencing:

  • Respiratory viruses
  • Sexually transmitted pathogens
  • Antimicrobial-resistant (AMR) genes from bacteria
  • Microbial bioreactor contaminants

Details of the content of these new panels and their performance across several different applications and sample types will be presented in this session.

Speakers

Dylan Barbera
Dylan Barbera received his bachelors in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with a minor in Microbiology from The Pennsylvania State University. He received his Master's of Science from Mount St. Mary's University in Biotechnology and Management. Dylan began his career in NGS in 2015 and joined QIAGEN in 2016 as a Quality Control Scientist. He currently serves as a Global Product Manager for QIAGEN's portfolio of Microbiology and Whole Genome Sequencing NGS products.