Reproducible, Reproducible, Reproducible

The same features of the Genpax analysis that mean that all strains of a species can be compared in one location with a common analysis resource (as opposed to others, such as those that must use multiple reference genomes or where resolution reduces with increasing numbers and diversity of strains), and its open scalability means it will generate equally comparable and integratable findings from information generated and submitted from different laboratories. This is enabled by its high accuracy/low noise, which is associated with very high reproducibility and the same result is obtained repeatedly from the reanalysis of the same sequence files and different independently sequenced DNA samples of the same strain.

Analyses of published data can readily show the benefits of this. There are examples of common strains split into different study and analysis groups in single hospitals, of transfers of MRSA between different UK centers, and of connected Listeria strains spanning three labs in two countries, just from a limited set of early studies using publicly available read sets.

This can form the basis of a new approach to public health surveillance. A bottom-up strategy empowered by the sequencing of strains in real clinical time that provides direct clinical and economic value, leading to more sequence information being collected in a more clinically relevant timeframe. The sequencing can be distributed close to the point of isolation but with the comparability of a centralized sequencing model. Equally, the data can be fully integrated when generated by hybrid models combining distributed and central sequencing. As more laboratories use the common analysis, the greater value the sequencing information can have locally and more widely.