ZymoBIOMICS Microbial Community Standard II

The ZymoBIOMICS™ Microbial Community Standard II is a well-defined, mock microbial community ideal for assessing the detection limit of microbiomics workflows and as a positive control for routine sequencing. Consisting of eight bacterial and two fungal strains mixed to create a log-distributed abundance, this standard is accurately characterised and contains negligible impurities. 75 µl of the standard contains about ~100 cells of Staphylococcus aureus, the organism of lowest abundance. If needed, the standard can be spiked into a sample matrix (e.g. soil and blood) to mimic real samples of interest.

Benefits of using this log distribution standard
• Well defined & characterised
• Less than 0.01% impurities
• Ideal for QC of microbiome measurements
• Assess the accuracy of microbiome measurements

Also available is the ZymoBIOMICS™ Microbial Community DNA Standard II, which consists of a mixture of genomic DNA of eight bacterial and two fungal strains and is ideal for assessing the performance of microbiomics workflows or as a positive control for routine QC. The microbiobial standard is accurately characterised and contains negligible impurity (<0.01%).

The microbial composition of the standard measured by NGS shotgun sequencing as compared to the defined composition. After mixing, the microbial composition of the standard was confirmed using deep Illumina® shotgun sequencing. Briefly, the genomic DNA was extracted using the ZymoBIOMICS™ DNA Miniprep. Library preparation was performed using an in-house protocol. Shotgun sequencing was performed using Illumina HiSeq™ or MiSeq™. Microbial abundance was estimated based on the number of reads that were mapped to references genomes of the organisms.

Microbial composition

¹ The theoretical composition in terms of 16S (or 16S and 18S) rRNA gene abundance was calculated from theoretical genomic DNA composition with the following formula: 16S/18S copy number = total genomic DNA (g) × unit conversion constant (bp/g) / genome size (bp) × 16S/18S copy number per genome. Use this as reference when performing 16S targeted sequencing.
² The theoretical composition in terms of genome copy number was calculated from theoretical genomic DNA composition with the following formula: genome copy number = total genomic DNA (g) × unit conversion constant (bp/g) / genome size (bp). Use this as reference when inferring microbial abundance from shotgun sequencing data based on read depth.
³ The theoretical composition in terms of cell number was calculated from theoretical genomic DNA composition with the following formula: cell number = total genomic DNA (g) × unit conversion constant (bp/g) / genome size (bp)/ploidy.

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Material available for download
ZymoBIOMICS™ Microbial Community Standard II (Log Distribution) protocol
ZymoBIOMICS™ Microbial Community Standard II (Log Distribution) SDS
ZymoBIOMICS™Microbial Community DNA Standard II (Log Distribution) protocol
ZymoBIOMICS™ Microbial Community DNA Standard II (Log Distribution) SDS