By Diagnostics World Staff
November 20, 2025 | Watchmaker Genomics has launched TAPS+, a next-generation technology that unites genetic and epigenetic readouts from the same DNA molecule. By capturing multiple biological dimensions in a single assay, TAPS+ delivers a richer, more comprehensive view of tumor biology, with the power to advance applications in translational oncology, early cancer detection, therapy response monitoring, fragmentomics, and minimal residual disease assessment.
Traditional methylation analysis techniques, such as bisulfite treatment, effectively collapse sequence diversity from four bases to three while often damaging DNA, the company explains. TAPS+ overcomes these limitations with a positive-readout chemistry that gently converts only methylated cytosines to thymines, leaving unmethylated cytosines unchanged. This preserves the natural four-base complexity of DNA, enabling accurate methylation profiling and improved read quality and variant detection across the genome.
Built on Watchmaker’s expertise in enzyme engineering and workflow optimization, TAPS+ streamlines multimodal sequencing into an automation-friendly library preparation completed in just six hours. The chemistry preserves sample integrity, improves CpG coverage, enables somatic variant calling, and reduces false positives, delivering consistent, high-quality results even from low-input, degraded, and clinically relevant samples, such as FFPE tissue and circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA).
Among more than 50 early evaluators, the company shared feedback from Dr. Matija Snuderl, Director of Molecular Pathology at NYU Langone Health, who has used TAPS+ to explore combined genomic and epigenomic profiling in tumor analysis.
“With TAPS+, we can directly detect 5mC alongside genetic drivers, even from difficult samples like FFPE or ctDNA from cerebrospinal fluid,” said Dr. Snuderl in a press release. “The combination of a unified workflow and improved chemistry delivers the kind of multimodal insight we’ve been waiting for in precision oncology.”
Broad Compatibility and Access
Designed with platform-agnostic compatibility, TAPS+ integrates seamlessly across sequencing systems. At the ASHG 2025 Annual Meeting, Roche presented feasibility results generated on their unreleased instrument. Ultima Genomics highlighted data demonstrating TAPS+ performance on the UG 100 – highlighting the chemistry’s flexibility and compatibility across platforms. Unlike other methylation technologies limited by restrictive licensing, Watchmaker is committed to broadly enabling TAPS+ for customer use across research and diagnostic applications on multiple sequencing platforms. This open, collaborative approach allows researchers and clinical laboratories to integrate TAPS+ within their existing ecosystems, accelerating the transition to multimodal genomic and epigenomic analysis across translational research, developmental biology, aging, neurobiology, and oncology.