The Artic Network is an international research consortium that developed protocols for epidemiological monitoring of viral genomes to provide insights into virus evolution and transmission for multiple viral outbreaks.

New England Biolabs' new kits have V3 primers and optimized reagents for uniform viral genome coverage across a range of inputs, the firm said. They also offer uniform, ample amplicon yields from gRNA across a wide copy number range and use the same reverse transcription (RT) step for all inputs. The kits for Illumina have options for library insert size and downstream sequencing parameters.

Specifically, NEBNext Artic SARS-CoV-2 FS Library Prep Kit (Illumina) incorporates enzymatic cDNA fragmentation and library inserts are approximately 150 bp, for 2 x 75 sequencing. The other prep kit for Illumina has around 400 bp library inserts, for 2 x 250 sequencing. The NEBNext Artic SARS-CoV-2 Companion Kit (Oxford Nanopore Technologies) has around 400 bp library inserts, for 2 to 24-hour sequencing runs.