About the Authors

Sabrina Shore

sshore@trilinkbiotech.com (SS); amccaffrey@trilinkbiotech.com (APM)

Affiliation Research and Development, Cell and Molecular Biology, TriLink BioTechnologies LLC., San Diego, California, United States of America

Jordana M. Henderson

Affiliation Research and Development, Cell and Molecular Biology, TriLink BioTechnologies LLC., San Diego, California, United States of America

Alexandre Lebedev

Affiliation Research and Development, Cell and Molecular Biology, TriLink BioTechnologies LLC., San Diego, California, United States of America

Michelle P. Salcedo

Affiliation Research and Development, Cell and Molecular Biology, TriLink BioTechnologies LLC., San Diego, California, United States of America

Gerald Zon

Affiliation Research and Development, Cell and Molecular Biology, TriLink BioTechnologies LLC., San Diego, California, United States of America

Anton P. McCaffrey

sshore@trilinkbiotech.com (SS); amccaffrey@trilinkbiotech.com (APM)

Affiliation Research and Development, Cell and Molecular Biology, TriLink BioTechnologies LLC., San Diego, California, United States of America

Natasha Paul

Affiliation Engineering and Instrumentation, Synthetic Genomics, Inc., La Jolla, California, United States of America

Richard I. Hogrefe

Affiliation Research and Development, Cell and Molecular Biology, TriLink BioTechnologies LLC., San Diego, California, United States of America

Competing Interests

I have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: Several of the authors (SS, JMH, AL, MPS, GZ, APM, RIH) are employed by a commercial company: TriLink BioTechnologies, LLC where GZ is a consultant and RIH is the CEO. One of the authors (NP) was previously employed by TriLink BioTechnologies, LLC but is currently at Synthetic Genomics, Inc. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. Patent application pending on CleanTag (modified adapter technology) Chemically modified ligase cofactors, donors and acceptors (WO 2014144979 A1; US 8728725B2; 20140323354;) This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. This technology was commercialized and is sold as CleanTag Small RNA Library Preparation Kit (catalog #L-3206) at TriLink BioTechnologies, LLC. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization: SS JMH MPS APM NP AL GZ RIH. Data curation: SS. Formal analysis: SS JMH MPS. Funding acquisition: SS AL GZ NP RIH. Investigation: SS JMH MPS. Methodology: SS JMH APM NP. Project administration: SS APM NP RIH. Resources: RIH. Supervision: SS APM NP RIH. Validation: SS JMH MPS. Visualization: SS JMH. Writing – original draft: SS JMH. Writing – review & editing: SS JMH APM NP GZ.