As a leading provider of genomic services, BMK offers diverse genomic solutions to meet different research goals in microbial diversity, taxonomy and phylogeny studies.  We are equipped with all the cutting-edge sequencing platforms, covering NGS and NNGS technologies. Our expert team owns massive experience on amplicon sequencing of over 4,000 projects, generating over 65 high impact publications. In addition, we are excited to offer our clients “full-length amplicon sequencing” with PacBio sequencing platform, which achieves an annotation resolution at species-level. Our own-developed bioinformatic analysis platform, BMKCloud, enables our clients to have more flexible parameter design and process multiple analysis in parallel. On BMKCloud, you can analyse you data in any way you like! 

What is 16S/18S/ITS amplicon sequencing?

Microbial community mapping has long been limited by the experimental difficulties in traditional methodologies at cell levels, until sequencing technology comes onto the stage with growing throughput and shrinking cost. The subunit on 16S rRNA containing both highly conserved and hypervariable regions (Figure 1a.), firstly discovered in 1977 by Woese et al., is a perfect molecular fingerprint for prokaryotic organisms identification. Subsequently, similar structures on 18S rRNA (Figure 1b.) were described and applied for eukaryotes identification.
Taking advantage of sequencing, these amplicons can be targeted based on the conserved parts and the hypervariable regions can be fully charaterised for microbial identification contributing to studies covering microbial diversity analysis, taxonomy, phylogeny, etc.