Enzymatic Fragmentation

Enzymatic Methods

4) DNase I or other restriction endonuclease, non-specific nuclease

5) Transposase

Enzymatic methods to shear DNA into small pieces include DNAse I, a combination of maltose binding protein (MBP)-T7 Endo I and a non-specific nuclease Vibrio vulnificus (Vvn), NEB’s (Ipswich, MA) Fragmentase and Nextera tagmentation technology (Illumina, San Diego, CA). The combination of non-specific nuclease and T7 Endo synergistically work to produce non-specific nicks and counter nicks, generating fragments that disassociate 8 nucleotides or less from the nick site. Tagmentation uses a transposase to simultaneously fragment and insert adapters onto dsDNA. Generally enzymatic fragmentation has shown to be consistent, but worse when compared to physical shear methods when it comes to bias and detecting insertions and deletions (indels) (Knierim et al., 2011). Depending on your specific application, de novo genome sequencing vs. small genome re-sequencing, biases associated with enzymatic fragmentation may not be as important.

RNAse III is an endonuclease that cleaves RNA into small fragments with 5’phosphate and 3’hydroxyl groups. While these end groups are needed for RNA ligation, making the assay convenient, RNAse III cleavage does have sequence preference which makes the cleavage biased. Heat / chemical methods described below, while they leave 3’phosphate and 5’hydroxyl ends, show less sequence bias and are generally preferred methods in library preparation.