HIGH THROUGHPUT MICROFLUIDIC SAMPLE PREPARATION FOR METAGENOMIC ANALYSIS

Metagenomics deal with analysis of genetic material from environmental samples. The ultimate goal is to reconstruct entire genomes of unknown microbial species. We present a sample preparation method using the Fluidigm© C1 microfluidic platform that integrates throughput of shotgun sequencing with bioinformatics simplicity of single cell microfluidics. Our method is tested with a benchmark sample and characterize its mapping quality and coverage uniformity. We conclude that our microfluidic based pipeline is suitable for metagenomic applications.