Statement of Work.docx

STATEMENT OF WORK

Metagenomic Sequencing of 672 Pig Fecal Samples Background USDA, Agricultural Research Service (ARS), Animal Biosciences and Biotechnology Laboratory (ABBL) requests a Contractor from which to purchase a service which will produce a set of shotgun sequencing reads for 672 pig fecal samples. Shotgun sequencing is the sequencing of all DNA present in a sample. In this case, it is the sequencing of all microbial DNA present in piglet fecal samples. ARS scientists will use these data in various downstream bioinformatics analyses including the assignment of sequences to species to determine the taxonomic composition of the samples, and the identification of genes and pathways each species contains. Furthermore, this large scale sequencing project will provide the data required to develop novel machine learning algorithms which elucidate the complex associations between the microbiome members and the piglet host. Thus, production of this highly dimensional dataset will result in multiple final outcomes which will contribute to the meeting of multiple National Program objectives.

Statement of Work 672 DNA samples will be provided by ARS-ABBL scientists to the Contractor, who will in turn provide shotgun metagenomic library preparation and sequencing on these samples (~20 million read pairs per sample). DNA should be quantified using the Qubit system, normalized, and then processed into sequencing libraries using SeqWell kits and sequenced on the recently released Illumina Nova X sequencer. The reliability and accuracy of each of these methods is supported in the scientific literature. Raw sequence data for each sample will be delivered to researchers within ARS-ABBL.

Schedule of Line Items Line Item 01 –library preparation and sequencing of 672 piglet fecal samples Deliverable will include raw sequence reads for each of 672 piglet fecal samples