Kapa HyperPlus vs Covaris

[sshell]

Does anyone have feedback on the Kapa HyperPlus enzymatic DNA fragmentation vs Covaris? I have access to a Covaris but the enzymatic method would be much more convenient... assuming it works well!

[nucacidhunter]

Almost all suppliers in their technotes claim that their enzymatic DNA fragmentation gives similar or better results than Covaris or their competitors. My comments:
1- Shearing is not sensitive to buffer or DNA quality to some extent, but all the enzymatic methods require or prefer a particular buffer for best results.
2- Buffer requirement is really annoying for core centres dealing with DNA from different clients
3- The enzymatic methods are time or quantity sensitive requiring special attention
4- These methods are acceptable for labs that do not have access to Covaris or desire fast high throughput fragmentation

[vinni_bio]

I agree with nucacidhunter. Covaris shearing will produce much more consistent size distributions across all your samples. When I tried to use KAPA fragmentation enzyme, size distributions were highly sensitive to the input DNA concentrations. Samples with small DNA concentrations (<100ng) required much shorter time for fragmentation than those with ~500ng. And samples with DNA concentration >750ng always produced libraries with a large portion of long fragments. Therefore, be prepared to spend some time and reagents for calibration before you actually start doing your libraries with enzymatic fragmentation.