New England Biolabs (NEB ®) will present several scientific posters at this week's Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) meeting in Boston, MA, highlighting collaborations with leading laboratory liquid-handling automation providers, including Beckman Coulter Genomics, Eppendorf, Hamilton Company, Revvity, and SPT Labtech to support customer implementation of NEBNext® reagents for next-generation sequencing (NGS) library preparation.

According to Michael Benway, Sr. Automation Field Application Scientist for NEB, "As the manufacturer of reagents for NGS library prep, we seek to enable automation providers by working collaboratively on workflows and scripts for library prep methods that demonstrate equivalent or improved performance when executed on automated workstations. By leveraging the expertise of automation providers, we are then able to deploy the optimized methods globally to ensure customer success."

NEB's collaborative approach is built on close work with laboratory automation partners to automate, optimize and verify performance across a wide range of NEBNext products, including NEBNext UltraExpress® DNA and RNA Library Prep, NEBNext Enzymatic Methyl-seq (EM-seq™), and NEBNext Low-bias Small RNA Kits.

"Standardized, automation-ready workflows are critical for scaling NGS across organizations and geographies," said Michael Mouradian, Vice President of Scientific Strategy and Market Development at Hamilton Company. "Our collaboration with NEB focuses on delivering robust, transferable methods that laboratories can deploy with confidence, while reducing implementation time and validation burden."

According to Nicole Madamba, Sr. Manager of Research Applications at Revvity, "Our longstanding work with NEB has allowed us to apply our expertise to develop and deploy customer-centric automation solutions that we can support globally."

Critical for the shift to portable, globally supported workflows is the standardization and optimization of hardware and software to ensure that solutions developed can be readily shared with customers, with minimal support required to customize and validate for specific customer needs.

Paul Lomax, Genomics Leader at SPT Labtech, "By applying software development principles to protocol design, we've transformed how we collaborate with NEB. This methodology allows us to build more robust NGS solutions that are instantly scalable and ready for immediate deployment across customer sites."

The collaborative relationships between NEB and automation providers has been longstanding and customer-focused, delivering high-quality results for scientists worldwide, "Our partnership with NEB has always been driven by the shared goal of solving customer problems, and our collective commitment, leveraging both the Biomek and Echo liquid handlers, has empowered us to overcome some of the most significant challenges in automated NGS," according to Ewan Grant, Senior Director, Automation Portfolio, Beckman Coulter Life Sciences.