GSS has the potential to bring two fundamentally new capabilities to more than 1,000 laboratories performing advanced research in microbial genomics.

The first application area involves bacterial population profiling for microbiome analyses. Recent studies show that humans harbor vast and diverse populations of microorganisms that are essential to life and health. Research is now focused on correlating health and disease to the composition and changes in an individual’s microbiome. With more than 1,000 publications in 2011, microbiome analysis is one of the fastest growing fields of investigation.

Current techniques for profiling the microbiome in a specimen are labor intensive and can take several weeks. GSS’ ability to detect and quantitate thousands of bacterial strains in a single, multi-hour test make it ideally suited to become a mainstay of microbiome research.

The second application area involves rapid, high-resolution strain-typing. Molecular typing of bacteria is widely used to understand how differences in genomic profile correlate to phenotypic characteristics such as pathogenicity.

Current typing techniques such as pulse-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) take several days and results are difficult to compare among different operators and laboratories. GSS enables high resolution typing to be performed in hours and with a consistent data format that allows genomic structures can be readily compared.