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.