Agilent Technologies introduces SureSelect Human All Exon Kit

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) has chosen the Cambridge Health Institute’s Next-Generation Sequencing Analysis conference today to introduce its SureSelect Human All Exon Kit for target enrichment prior to next-generation DNA sequencing.

This catalog kit extends the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the SureSelect Target Enrichment System to studies of all human exons, a region totaling approximately 38 Mb. Available next month, the kit is offered in sizes appropriate for studies comprised of a few to several thousand samples. The in-solution-based SureSelect Target Enrichment System easily scales up and is well-suited for automation.

“We’re pleased to introduce this off-the-shelf kit following an extensive early-access program in which leading researchers around the globe produced very positive results,” said Fred Ernani, Ph.D., Agilent emerging genomics applications product manager.

The SureSelect Human All Exon Kit design covers 1.22 percent of human genomic regions corresponding to the NCBI Consensus CDS Database (CCDS), including more than 700 human miRNAs from the Sanger v13 database and more than 300 additional human non-coding RNAs in a single tube.

“The sequencing results we are getting using the SureSelect Human All Exon Kit in collaboration with Agilent are promising; we believe we can use SureSelect to scale the Broad’s exome sequencing efforts moving forward,” said Stacey Gabriel, Ph.D., Co-Director, Genome Sequencing and Analysis Program and Medical and Population Genetics Program of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

“With the completion of the human genome sequence and those of other organisms aiding the annotation of the human sequence, we can begin to answer questions about individual human genomic variation in the context of both normal variation and variation relating to disease,” said Dr. Alison Coffey, head of Target Preparation, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI).

“The WTSI has a strong program in medical sequencing and has developed a very efficient, accurate high-throughput pipeline for genomic re-sequencing as a result,” said Dr. Dan Turner, head of Sequencing Technology Development, WTSI. “It therefore needs a system that is robust, reproducible, easy to use and easily scalable to cope with the anticipated large numbers of exomes we hope to sequence in the near future.”

SureSelect Human All Exon kits will be available for both the Illumina GA II and Life Technologies SOLiD System, with the initial product offered for paired-end sequencing on the system from Illumina. The product optimized for SOLiD will follow shortly and is in the final stages of optimization.

Agilent’s SureSelect Target Enrichment System is now the platform with the most optimized protocols for a diverse set of sequencing protocols and platforms. It supports Illumina end-sequencing and paired-end sequencing protocols in addition to fragment library format sequencing on the SOLiD System. This technology enables users of Agilent’s eArray on-line design tool to improve the efficiency of their research by allowing them to efficiently design custom products to target 5-6 Mb of any genome of interest, all in a single tube.