Kapa Biosystems, a provider of next-generation engineered polymerases, announced the adoption of its KAPA2G™ Fast HotStart DNA Polymerase by industry and academic leaders in the fields of resequencing and SNP detection including Agencourt Bioscience, a Beckman Coulter Company, energy crop company Ceres, Inc., Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center (NISC).

The KAPA2G™ Fast HotStart DNA Polymerase was engineered for extreme speed, specificity and high performance, using Kapa Biosystems’ molecular evolution platform. It is capable of synthesizing DNA with a 1 second per kilobase extension time without a loss in performance, thus is particularly well suited for high throughput Fast PCR.In addition to speed, KAPA2G™ Fast HotStart has proven to be more robust than wild-type Taq polymerase, achieving higher yields, sensitivity, and success rates across a wide range of amplicon types.

“After a thorough evaluation of several hot start polymerase suppliers, Kapa Biosystems’ KAPA2G™ Fast HotStart significantly outperformed other competitive products”, said Patrick Finn, Director of R&D at Agencourt. “As a provider of resequencing and SNP detection services we require high quality, high performance reagents. We’re confident the Kapa enzyme will allow us to markedly increase the throughput and success rates of our service pipeline.”

Ceres senior genomics manager Timothy Swaller said that after testing the enzyme for several months he believes he can increase the number of daily reactions in the company’s high-throughput trait pipeline. “The robustness of the enzyme was quite a surprise” Swaller said. He noted that due to Ceres’ trait development work across a number of energy crop species, such as switchgrass, sorghum and miscanthus, it is helpful to have a robust enzyme that can work with diverse and complex genomes, without the need to redesign protocols and optimize reaction parameters.

“The use of this second generation polymerase allowed us to increase our throughput by 50%, while maintaining and even improving the quality of our results”, said Adriana Heguy, Manager of the Geoffrey Beene Translational Oncology Core Facility at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “This is really important because it accelerates the process of mutation detection.”

“We are thrilled with the overwhelming response to this product since its launch just 6 months ago,” said John Foskett, Technical Director and Co-Founder. “SNP Detection and resequencing are just a few examples of next-generation PCR applications that are being fueled by Kapa’s novel polymerases. We continue to be impressed with the strong market demand for our engineered, high performance PCR reagents and foresee the continued expansion of our product offering.”