Reducing Target Capture Costs

A new lab milestone! Lab Manager Haley Hale led a paper describing our protocol modifications for target capture in non-model plant species. In collaboration with Elliot Gardner (Chicago Botanic Gardens, Case Western University), Juan Viruel (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), and Lisa Pokorny (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), we collected our experience with high-throughput target capture to make recommendations for researchers.

The paper appeared online on April 15, 2020, click here to read it (open access).

Some highlights include:

• Recommendations on when (and when not) to use fragmentase on herbarium specimens.
• Success of “homebrewed” SPRI beads for cleanup of extractions and PCR reactions.
• Pooling strategies for target capture that allow for 96 samples per reaction.

The paper was part of an special issue on Low Cost Methods in Plant Sciences. In addition to all the wonderful new aritcles, the APPS editor team put together a list of articles covering many aspects of plant science from phenology to ecology to genomics!