Study on Helicos BioSciences' single molecule sequencing technology published

Helicos BioSciences Corporation (NASDAQ: HLCS) today announced the publication of a landmark study by Dr. Bradley Bernstein of the Massachusetts General Hospital describing the use of Helicos’ single molecule sequencing technology for the performance of genome-wide, epigenomic experiments using minute amounts of nucleic acid. The paper entitled “Chromatin Profiling by Directly Sequencing Small Quantities of Immunoprecipitated DNA” appeared in the online version of Nature Methods yesterday.

Scientists at Helicos collaborated with a team led by Dr. Bradley Bernstein, one of the foremost experts in the field of epigenomics, to demonstrate the first direct sequencing of chromatin immunoprecipitated (ChIP-Seq) nucleic acid from a small amount of starting material. This work represents an important broadening of the application of ChIP-Seq to the fields of cancer progression and developmental biology, areas of research in which sample amounts are often limiting. The new approach obviates the need for complex sample preparation and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification steps that can lead to biased or incomplete results, and provides the opportunity to investigate the epigenomes of new cell types that were previously inaccessible.

“Understanding genome regulation has been hampered by the need to use millions of cells for protein-DNA interaction experiments and the requirement to amplify the DNA. Our collaboration using Helicos’ single-molecule sequencing technology demonstrates the ability to minimize the use of sample and to analyze the DNA directly,” stated Dr. Patrice Milos, CSO at Helicos. “By reducing the number of cells required for analysis, it is expected that Helicos’ technology will help to provide a significantly higher resolution of genome regulation than previously possible.”

This study affirms the simplicity of the methods required for single molecule sequencing and demonstrates the enabling potential of the method for characterizing the small cell numbers required for, amongst other things, studies of early stem cell differentiation.

“We have benefited tremendously from our collaborative work with Dr. Bernstein and his colleagues,” described Ron Lowy, CEO at Helicos. “They approached Helicos because they were convinced that single molecule sequencing was the only way to elucidate regulatory differences between important cell types such as embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells. This first joint manuscript demonstrates that this is indeed the case. We believe that this marks the beginning of more breakthrough studies to come.”

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