Twist Bioscience Announced Targeted Methylation Sequencing Solution to Study Methylation Pattern Changes

Twist Bioscience Corporation announced the Twist Targeted Methylation Sequencing solution to study methylation pattern changes in a range of research fields including cancer, epigenetics and non-invasive prenatal testing is available for early access customers.

In addition, the company announced the launch of its Comprehensive Exome Panel, an NGS target enrichment solution that includes more than 99% of protein coding genes.

Twist was highlighting these new solutions as well as customer testimonials at the 2020 Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting, held February 23-26, 2020, in Florida. During the meeting, several customers were demonstrating their use of the firm’s NGS target enrichment solutions for numerous clinical research applications.

“Our NGS products continue to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations; building on our high quality DNA that leads to uniform capture of the regions of interest results in more efficient sequencing, and ultimately better research,” said Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder. “We are thrilled to have our customers sharing their experiences in three burgeoning areas at AGBT: consumer genomics leveraging our target enrichment solution plus sequencing as a replacement for SNP microarray technology; initial uses in methylation research for the early detection of cancer; and the identification of residual leukemia. Building on these important use cases, we are committed to continue to deliver DNA-based products that interrogate biology and enable improved clinical outcomes.“

Customers highlight results with Twist NGS solutions

On February 25, 2020, 3 customers were presenting their results after using the NGS Target Enrichment solutions for several important applications:

• Catherine Foo, Ph.D., director, laboratory sciences, Ancestry:  Launching an NGS assay for estimating genetic ancestry and providing health insights

• Jesse Salk, M.D., Ph.D., CEO, TwinStrand Biosciences, Inc.: Ultra-sensitive residual leukemia detection with patient-specific Duplex Sequencing

• Gahee Park, Ph.D., University of Cambridge: Targeted epigenome sequencing of cell-free DNA to improve sensitivity for cancer early detection

Product introduction and preview:

Twist Comprehensive Exome Panel
Exome sequencing has become a widely-used practice in clinics and diagnostic labs. The Twist Comprehensive Exome Panel expands upon the content of the Twist Human Core Exome to include coverage of more than 99% of protein-coding genes from all three key public genetic databases: CCDS, RefSeq and GENCODE, providing coverage of the most up-to-date content. In addition, the panel can be customized quickly and affordably. Because of the updated and comprehensive coverage, the new panel allows customers to increase confidence in variant detection experiments while enjoying maximum sequencing efficiency and best coverage uniformity.

Twist Targeted Methylation Sequencing solution
DNA methylation plays a role in many biological processes and disease. When a methyl group is added to a single nucleotide in a genetic sequence, it can change the gene’s behavior, even without changing the sequence. For example, when a methyl group is located in a gene promotor, it often acts to repress gene transcription into a protein. Methylation is a focus of current cancer research because it offers tremendous promise in understanding the physiology and pathology of disease as well as approaches for prevention and treatment of disease. The company’s Targeted Methylation solution offers a high-throughput, highly uniform target enrichment solution to explore methylation in a range of applications including epigenetic and oncology research. This product is available for early access customers today.

Twist NGS Target Enrichment solutions
Applying its proprietary silicon-based DNA synthesis platform, the company manufactures double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) that is incorporated into sample preparation products for customers performing next-gen sequencing experiments and analysis. Because Twist is able to apply its custom oligonucleotide pools to precisely target, extract, and uniformly amplify the target DNA segments, its NGS target Enrichment solutions considerably improve the accuracy of the downstream sequencing analysis. This enables customers to perform fewer sequencing runs per sample, without sacrificing accuracy, saving time and money. This product suite is designed to provide performance, maximum sequencing efficiency and improved uniform coverage along with the flexibility to customize kit configuration.

The firm believes it is the only company to offer double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) probes within a comprehensive target enrichment kit used for exome and targeted sequencing. Using dsDNA as opposed to single-stranded DNA allows specified sequences to be uniformly captured and reduces deamination (removal of an amino group). Deamination interferes with the accurate detection of gene mutations, and may distort genetic results and hinder clinical diagnoses, particularly in cancer and ancient samples.

Twist NGS Solutions are indicated for research use only.