BaseClear offers a culturomics solution that enables the identification and discovery of microbial cultures or mixtures which produce novel enzymes, antimicrobials agents, bioactive compounds and next-generation probiotics. Our culturomics platform allows high-throughput screening and analysis of microbial strains and samples with the aim of discovering novel microbial strains and new physiological and metabolic properties.
Even though microbial ecosystems have an enormous diversity, and microbial communities have great application potential, fundamental and applied microbial research have been focused on a very limited number of isolated single strains. This is because many microorganisms require specific culture conditions or depend on symbiotic interactions for growth and, therefore, are difficult to study. Consequently, the majority of microbial diversity remains uncultured and poorly characterized. This means that we have yet to discover the major fraction of the microbial potential available in nature.
BaseClear offers unique solutions for research on complex microbial samples such as deep-sea soil samples, sludge, hundreds of year old samples from alkaline and acidic environments, faeces, intestinal content samples, decaying wood, oral or vaginal swabs, among others, to generate pure cultures in a high-throughput approach.
BaseClear can identify and characterise new microbial strains and activities using;
Culturomics can be used as a complementary technique to metagenome analysis. Metagenome analysis provides genetic information about the abundant microorganisms present in a complex microbial consortium. Due to the challenges in identifying the unknown content of microbial communities, culturomics can provide some of the missing gaps with the added advantage of enabling a better understanding of the physiological, metabolic and ecological roles and potential industrial applications of the generated cultures.
Chief Scientific Officer Alex van Belkum is a highly cited molecular microbiologist with extensive experience in molecular- and culture-based diagnostics, antimicrobial resistance testing and clinical microbiology. “I’m excited by how BaseClear can contribute further to developing solutions for global health challenges through data-rich technologies in clinical microbiology. The combination of Next Generation Sequencing technologies, culturomics and microbiome research has huge potential for the future.”
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