Independent Sample–Specific Amplification with icon96™ System

Presented at NextGen Omics, Spatial & Data US 2026

Dr. Aziz Al'Khafaji, R&D scientist at the Broad Institute, presents real-world data on how his lab deployed the n6 icon96 system with AutoNorm™ technology across demanding NGS workflows — including long-read RNA sequencing of 148 variable-quality postmortem brain samples, targeted amplicon libraries, and complex methods development. He details how over-amplification during PCR introduces recombination artifacts and barcode swapping that compromise data integrity, and demonstrates how AutoNorm's per-well adaptive amplification control eliminates these issues without requiring any a priori knowledge of cycle number or input quality.
The result: cleaner data, fewer re-runs, and library prep time cut in half.

What You'll Learn

• Why over-amplification causes recombination artifacts and barcode swapping — and why standard fixed-cycle protocols can't prevent it
• How AutoNorm independently controls amplification in every well, stopping each reaction at the optimal pre-plateau point regardless of input variability
• How the Broad Institute applied icon96 across 148 postmortem brain samples with highly variable RNA quality — with zero sample re-runs
• How probe-capture library prep that would have taken two days was completed in a single afternoon using icon96
• Why auto-balancing libraries with iconPCR removes the need for provisional qPCR runs and manual normalization steps
• How icon96 enables fair, comparable matrix optimization across complex condition spaces in methods development
• Why single-cell library prep is the next frontier for AutoNorm — and what that means for data quality in single-shot workflows