RevoluGen Ltd. announce its agreement with Tecan, a pioneer and global leader in laboratory automation, for the manufacturing and supply of Tecan's 96-well filter plates to be used in RevoluGen's automated Fire Monkey™ High Molecular Weight (HMW)-DNA extraction kits. Automated DNA extraction using these specialized 96-well plates, which incorporate the proprietary Fire Monkey extraction technology and are optimised for use on Tecan's small desktop footprint Resolvex® A200 positive pressure automation robot, speeds up and simplifies the preparatory workflow needed for high throughput of both short and long read DNA sequencing applications, ultimately reducing costs. The two companies started to work together in 2020 to validate an automated DNA extraction workflow, the critical first step in the DNA sequencing workflow.

RevoluGen's patent-protected technology is derived from a spin-column based protocol to extract HMW-DNA using a high g-force but which does not break down the long and fragile DNA molecules as much as standard spin-column technologies. Fire Monkey produces DNA fragments of an average 100kb in length that are not too short and not too long and are found to be in a relatively tightly defined range of lengths. The Fire Monkey extract has so few small fragments that separate size selection steps are usually not required and so few very long fragments that separate fragmentation steps are also generally not required.

This selectivity improves the overall sequencing results by not wasting as much sequencing resources on either reading the less useful small fragments or blocking the pores or wells with fragments that are too long. The Fire Monkey technology can also be size tuned into producing DNA fragments in very tight bands of smaller lengths below its standard 100kb average DNA extract length. This tuning can be dialled down to produce the average DNA extract length most suitable for optimal throughput performance of all sequencing technologies.