Orders & Shipments
How to Track My Order?
After purchasing the order, you should have received an email confirming the purchase. A shipment tracking number should arrive 2 business days after the purchase. If you haven't received the message, or if you have any other questions, please reach out on our contact page.
Shipping Cost
It’s our treat! Shipping costs are free for any delivery in the continental US.
Shipment Time
All shipments are processed overnight and ship immediately from our manufacturer on dry ice.
Locations We Ship To
Shipping is free anywhere in the continental US. We do ship internationally as well, shoot us a note on our contact page.
Choosing a Kit
What samples does this work for?
The microbiome kits work for both complex microbiome samples and pure cultures.
The mycobiome kits works with any fungal samples.
The transcriptome kit works for looking at abundance or doing isoform discovery. It works in two modes.
The DNA kit works for bacterial genome assembly, viral genome assembly, mutagenisis detection, synthetic biology, immunology and many more amplicon based applications.
If you. have any questions regarding a specific sample type, please reach out on our contact page.
Can I mix sample types in a single kit?
Samples from different sources can be multiplexed in the same kit. Our single sample calibration in all of the kit protocols allows for this.
How many barcodes (BCs) can I sequence from a 24 plex kit?
If your DNA is of good quality (e.g. not overly fragmented, high yield) per sample, expect approximately 10,000 BCs per sample, which is ~250,000 BCs from a kit.
What if I don’t need to use all 24 reactions?
That's no problem for out Transcriptome and DNA kits.
Our Transcriptome and DNA kits are in an 3x8 reaction format so you can process as few as 8 samples at a time.
Our 16S kits are in a 24 reaction format only. You can choose to load samples as replicates (e.g. 8 unique samples in triplicate = 24 reactions). Alternatively, you can load pure water in place of genomic DNA for at most 5 wells (20% of the kit capacity).
Does this work for non-microbiome?
Yes, we offer several types of kits.
Our technology is general purpose and lends it's sell to a multitude of applications.
We currently of kits for microbiome, mycobiome, transcritptome and DNA applications.
How much hands on time is the kit?
All of our kits have 8.5 hours of assay time and 2.5 hours of hands on time.
Troubleshooting
How clean does my DNA need to be?
DNA concentrations should be taken using a Fluorometer, such as the Invitrogen Qubit system, to avoid falsely high concentration readings that can occur due to contamination. Avoid residual ethanol or phenol in the genomic DNA preparation.
No DNA in final library.
We’re sorry something went wrong! Reach out to us on our contact page and our team will help get to the bottom of this.
PCR machine is old
For optimal results, use PCR machines with a ramp rate of at least 2-3C per second.
Do I have enough DNA in ng? (i.e., I don’t have enough)
If you do not have 2 ng/ul of DNA for a sample and therefore cannot load 10 ng in total, you can load less DNA into the plate well as long as the total amount of DNA is not below 2 ng. To compensate, when you pool the 24 reactions, for those wells that received less than 10ng of DNA, carry forward more for pooling (i.e. if you only used 5ng, carry forward twice as much for pooling). If you do not have 2 ng in total in 5ul of your DNA prep, you will need to repeat your DNA preparation.
Technology
What is a synthetic long read?
Synthetic long reads are the assembly of tagged short reads into long reads using a computer algorithm to find overlapping segments between the short read segments. Since each short read is tagged with a barcode, Loop knows which reads come from the same molecule and can therefore assemble properly.
What’s barcoding?
The Loop barcodes are a unique identifier for a single molecule. Each molecule gets a unique barcode. At Loop, we use the barcodes to assemble short read next-generation sequences into synthetic long reads.
Lab Service
What do I get?
It’s Loop’s business to get you the data that answers your questions. When you send us your samples, we use our leading technology and analysis pipeline to categorize the bacterial species and strains in your samples. From the analysis we will send you the FASTQ
files with the long read sequencing data, a CSV file of our analysis, and a report with histograms and bar charts from the sample.
If you are interested in additional analysis, we have partnerships with leading bioinformatics companies which can produce additional insights.
What is the average turnaround time?
We can process samples as in either 7 days or 35 days. Reach out to us to see if we’re the right group for you.
I don’t have extracted DNA.
If you don't have extracted DNA that's fine. We have extraction partners that we work with so we can offer you a complete sample->answer solution.
I have less than 8 samples.
That’s fine! Send us a note, we would love to discuss how to make it work. Send us a message through our contact page.