Merck’s supply chain and eCommerce strength will allow broader availability and accessibility of the Fire Monkey / Fire Flower product to customers

The UK genomic tools developer, RevoluGen Ltd., announced today a global distribution agreement for its Fire Monkey / Fire Flower product with Merck KGAA*. The Fire Monkey / Fire Flower product is a kit that can be used to perform either the Fire Monkey purification of DNA for long-read sequencing applications, utilizing its reliable, rapid, user friendly protocol, or to perform the Fire Flower DNA size selection protocol.

The Fire Monkey product is a Nucleic Acid Isolation and Purification (NAIP) protocol that extracts high quality, HMW-DNA from animal and bacterial cells. The long DNA fragments that Fire Monkey extracts from samples contain minimal contaminating small DNA fragments. These characteristics are highly competitive in the long-read sequencing arena as these samples can generate N50 results of around 50kb for specific long-read protocols.

The Fire Flower protocol depletes small fragments of DNA below 10,000 base pairs in length. This size selection process increases the proportion of longer DNA fragments in a sample and therefore improves long-read sequencing considerably, independent of whatever type of NAIP kit has been used and independent of the subsequent sequencing technology.

Under the terms of the agreement, Merck has acquired the non-exclusive rights for worldwide distribution of the Fire Monkey / Fire Flower product. RevoluGen remains the legal manufacturer of the product.

“With this agreement, we are able to provide more customers with access to RevoluGen’s Fire Monkey / Fire Flower product for producing the clean and High Molecular Weight-DNA (HMW-DNA) needed for long-read sequencing. Our Fire Monkey / Fire Flower product should prove to be disruptive in the NAIP market with its average DNA length of 100kb or more and its built-in size selection capability which significantly removes DNA fragments under 10kb in length,” said Pieter Haitsma Mulier, CEO of RevoluGen Limited.

*Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, a leading science and technology company, operates across healthcare, life science and performance materials.