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.