QIAGEN announced a collaboration with Penn State University in the United States to create a shared research and education facility for the fast-developing microbiome sciences. The university-industry partnership will serve as a beacon for this field by investigating research opportunities that address challenges and research gaps facing the microbiome, which involves the research into a community of microorganisms that can be found living together in any given environment, including the human body. In doing so, this new partnership will provide QIAGEN with a site to support the development of new products as a testing center.

It is also designed to provide vital industry research and training opportunities for next-generation scientists. This includes an internship program for graduate students from Penn State at QIAGEN laboratories at the European operational headquarters in Hilden, Germany, and helps them prepare for careers in the biotechnology industry. Among the various projects in this partnership, the team will support the worldwide science education program Discover the Microbes Within The Wolbachia Project.

This program enables students at the middle and high school levels, as well as those in college, to learn about arthropods (animals without backbones that have an outer skeleton made of chitin, segmented bodies and legs with joints, including insects, spiders, mites and crustaceans) and collect scientific data about the bacterial endosymbiont (an organism living inside another one for the benefit of both) Wolbachia pipientis. Due to these real-world impacts, Wolbachia is often used as a model organism to investigate animal-microbe interactions, genetics, evolution, ecology and human health. Microbiome research aims to explore the relationships between microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi and viruses, and their hosts.

It can help to better understand the microbiome?s impact on health, diseases and ecological processes in order to develop novel diagnostic solutions and therapeutic strategies. The project at the One Health Microbiome Center (OHMC) at Penn State?s Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences will see QIAGEN provide instruments and kits for preparing and processing microbial samples. QIAGEN?s comprehensive microbiome portfolio encompasses tools for every aspect of the scientific workflow, including reliable sample preparation kits optimized for investigating challenging samples from environmental and human microbiomes.

To ensure reproducibility, QIAGEN offers sample preparation automation for standardization and reliability. The extensive range of microbiome solutions also includes downstream processing technologies such as NGS, digital PCR (dPCR), or quantitative PCR (qPCR), all complemented by robust bioinformatics tools for seamless digital analysis.