Two hot trends for microbial research labs in 2025

Does lab imitate life? In 2025, we believe it will.

There are trends that will become unavoidable no matter if you’re sitting on your sofa scrolling through your phone or sitting on the lab bench extracting DNA from stool samples. No matter the environment, you want personalized products and you want robots to do your routine work.

Based on these observations, we conclude that in 2025, automation and customization are two things (besides E.coli) that will likely undergo exponential growth in your lab. But what does it mean for your research?

Making friends with machines – We want the robots to vacuum our house, so we can read more books and take more walks. We want robots in the lab to handle the routine, hands-on stuff, so we can think, plan, analyze and do more interesting experiments.

If you adopt more automation in your lab work, for example, for DNA purification from fecal samples with the EZ2 Connect platform,?you’ll extract more high-purity DNA faster. Good yields and high-quality DNA will minimize bias in your downstream PCR or NGS analysis. You’ll end up with more consistent and reliable data, which is essential for studying the intricate dynamics of the human microbiome. And you need only one kit for DNA, RNA or both, because simplicity is also a trend not to be ignored.

It’s all about YOUR targets – When you’re passionate about something you really want to make it your own. You want to build your own computer, you want to personalize your app’s news feed. You want to pay attention only to what you need and pay only for what you need.

This easily carries over into the lab. Take next-generation sequencing. Until now, microbial panels have been typically designed against a single reference sequence. But with custom panels for any microbial species, you can design against hundreds to thousands of sequences at the same time. With this approach, you can fully cover the diversity of a viral/bacterial genome, avoiding any large gaps. You’re free to target your microbes only, removing “noise” and even better, removing the need for culture. Thanks to custom-targeted enrichment panels, you can get more data with less sequencing depth, which saves you costs and time.

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) isn’t the only method to be hit by the customization wave. Digital PCR (dPCR) assays can now also be altered to fit your microbial target needs. There are already more than 700 pre-existing, and many wet-lab-validated, dPCR assays?against bacterial, fungal, parasitic and viral species. And if you can’t find your target, you can design your own custom dPCR assay in just mere minutes.

What have you already automated and customized in your lab? Or is there a trend that’s missing? Leave us a comment below.