Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Roche NimbleGen Inc., a fully integrated part of Roche Applied Science, have published details of a highly efficient and cost-effective method for capturing targeted regions of the genome via NimbleChip microarrays in preparation for high-throughput 454 Sequencing.
The technology, called “sequence capture,” enables fast and accurate enrichment of thousands of selected genomic regions, either contiguous or dispersed, such as segments of chromosomes or all genes or exons. The study, entitled “Direct Selection of Human Genomic Loci by Microarray Hybridization,” appears online (ahead of print) in the journal Nature Methods 1 .
In light of the success of the current sequence capture technology, Baylor's Human Genome Sequencing Center (HGSC) has signed on as an early access customer to Roche NimbleGen's sequence capture technology. As presented on October 10, 2007, at the J. Craig Venter Institute's Genomes, Medicine, and the Environment (GME) conference, Roche NimbleGen and 454 Life Sciences, working with Dr. Richard Gibbs, professor and Director of the HGSC, will create a whole-genome human exome (all exons) microarray, with the goal of resequencing the entire human exome.