The Ambion TotalPrep™ kit is biased for eukaryotic genomes, whereas the microbial mRNAs lack poly-A tails. Does Illumina support any sample prep/labeling kit for microbial genomes?
Illumina has not tested kits designed to label microbial RNA. Reagent vendors such as Ambion® do sell kits for this application. These kits may work, but there is no particular kit that we recommend. It is important that a single source of biotin-16-UTP (i.e., same vendor) is used for all labeling reactions (e.g., Ambion #8452 or #8453). • The CASAVA calls SNPs at areas where the coverage dips. These SNPs may not be real SNPs, but small indels. A small indel will cause a short run of snp calls (~indel+4) with a concomitant dip in coverage. Check whether the apparent SNP can be explained by a short indel.
