National Institute for Health and Welfare (later referred to as ‘THL’ or ‘Customer’) invites you to submit a tender according to this Invitation to tender and its Annexes for next-generation sequencing services. The service provider can submit a tender for one or more procurement sub-areas. Each procurement sub-area will be evaluated independently.

Sub-area A: Bacterial and Fungal DNA Amplicon sequencing;

Sub-area B: Bacterial DNA extraction and whole genome sequencing.

THL has prepared or will prepare DNA and RNA extracts of samples from natural and man-made environments and humans for microbiological characterization. The microbiome targets include primarily bacteria (16S rRNA) and fungi (ITS sequence), but may also include e.g. archaea and protozoa (18S rRNA). The exact total number of samples or the total number of batches per each amplicon target (bacteria, fungi, others) is not known. All batches will contain at least one negative and one positive control (mock community) sample. In total, we are anticipating to request bacterial and fungal amplicon sequencing service of several batches between 100 and 500 samples within the first 12 months, and similar throughput for following years.

Bacterial DNA extraction and whole genome sequencing service (complete service from nucleic acids or from a bacterial strain) THL will purchase both bacterial DNA extraction and whole genome sequencing service or just the latter depending on our needs. Bacterial cultures or bacterial DNA extracts of bacterial isolates from clinical human cases will be produced by the customer. The bacterial cultures sent for DNA extraction belong to biosafety Level 2 or 2+ (BSL-2 or BSL-2+), e.g. Streptococcus pneumoniae. The bacterial cultures will be inactivated before shipping. THL uses Illumina sequencing technology in house and the sequence data produced by the service provider must be comparable with the sequence data obtained in THL. The requirements for the data produced by the service provider are specified in the minimum requirements section. The sequence data will be used for microbiological strain typing and characterization.