A cool paper from the ARTIC network on swapping in commercial enzymes for NGS library prep!
Reducing Supply Chain Dependencies for Viral Genomic Surveillance: Get by with a Little HELP from Commercial Enzymes already in your Lab Freezer
Ganna Kovalenko, Myra Hosmillo, Chris Kent, Kess Rowe, Andrew Rambaut, Nicholas J Loman, Joshua Quick, Ian Goodfellow
bioRxiv 2025.06.11.658579; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.06.11.658579
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in global laboratory supply chains, disrupting genomic surveillance efforts essential to epidemic response. To address this challenge, we developed ARTIC HELP (Homebrew Enzymes for Library Preparation), a practical, open-source adaptation of the widely adopted ARTIC nanopore sequencing protocol for viral genomic surveillance. We describe generic, cost-effective alternatives to all enzyme mixes used in tiling multiplex RT-PCR amplification of the virus genome, and the nanopore native barcoding workflow,
I’m a Co-I on the new ARTIC 2.0 network and will be working with Prof Ian Goodfellow’s lab in Cambridge and Dr Josh Quick’s lab at the University of Birmingham on an Open Reagents work package, extending ARTIC HELP to local manufactured enzymes, reagents and hardware.
Your thoughts are welcome - report back if you give the HELP protocols a go!
Jenny