ZymoBIOMICS™ Microbial Community DNA Standard by Zymo Research

"The product was easy to use, easy to calculate how to spike in to samples, and added a significant level of confidence to the microbiome data we have been analyzing."

"I found this product really useful as a positive control for 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing work."

"Great product, consistently works well and we include it in all our V4 16S amplicon library preps for Illumina sequencing during PCR. We typically include at least 1 Zymo mock community per plate of samples."

"This product contains only two fungal strains, which is a big bummer for me, but overall is a reliable product that we count on daily in our lab."

"I use the ZymoBIOMICS Microbial DNA Standard as a separate sample during my 16S rRNA gene library preparation and sequencing experiments. The DNA standard contains a known amount of eight bacterial and two fungal species genomes to assess the performance of the microbiome pipelines from the very beginning until the data analysis step. It is very straightforward to use, and I have obtained accurate and reproducible results so far. I have also used this for optimizing PCR experiments, obtaining good results as well. Just a 'heads-up' for new users: when performing taxonomic assignation of the amplicon sequence variants obtained from the DNA Standard sample, double-check your results with more than a single 16S rRNA gene database in case you are missing any of the microbial species contained in the DNA Standard. I was using the Human Oral Microbiome Database (HOMD) for assigning taxonomy and I was missing Salmonella enterica on the DNA Standard sample. I double-checked the non-assigned (NA) amplicon sequence variants using standard nucleotide blast against the nucleotide collection database from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and, indeed, they were assigned to S. enterica."

"The community mock is always retrieved in the expected relative abundances. It provides a lot of certainty for the composition of my samples and the quality of sequencing. Examining the accuracy of the mock provides information on issues such as over- or under-representation of certain sequences and guides the subsequent filtering steps I need to take in order to accurately analyze my own samples."

"The ZymoBIOMICS Microbial Community Standard is used by my lab to assess DNA extraction bias and sequencing errors. It has almost become a 'gold standard' in our lab. I have recommended it to several colleagues and collaborators."

"So far the service has been timely, knowledgable and affordable. I haven't actually received my results, but I have had a pleasant experience so far."