454 Life Sciences, IDT in exclusive primer agreement

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BRANFORD, Conn.—454 Life Sciences, a Roche company, and Integrated DNA Technologies Inc. (IDT) announced the companies have entered into an exclusive co-promotional agreement wherein IDT will design, synthesize, and purify the fusion primers required for certain 454 sequencing applications. These applications include ultra-deep amplicon sequencing for detection of low-frequency mutations in disease associated genes, and the comprehensive identification and quantification of common and rare variants within a population.

The partnership offers Genome Sequencer FLX System users a convenient solution for primer creation, streamlining workflow and relieving bioinformatics burdens.

IDT's online fusion primer design tool uses a gen-specific data base number or a supplied reference sequence to build appropriate 454 FusionPrimers for targeted DNA regions, including individual exons or all exons from one or more genes. DNA secondary structure, such as hairpin formation, can affect primer performance. The software takes into account performance metrics of the entire fusion primer rather than simply adding 454 Life Sciences' universal adaptor sequence to an otherwise standard PCR primer. In addition to 454 FusionPrimer design, IDT has expertise in high-fidelity synthesis and HPLC purification that can aid the researcher in obtaining the best quality data from their 454 sequencing System.

"We are pleased to leverage IDT's significant experience in primer design and construction to offer our customers a one-stop solution for all their targeted resequencing projects," says Chris McLeod, CEO of 454. "By shifting the task of primer design to IDT's online tool, researchers can now focus their efforts on making discoveries."

As the only next-generation technology with the ability to sequence more than 400 bases per read, the Genome Sequencer FLX System enables comprehensive analysis, including haplotyping, of complete exons and other genomic regions. A number of powerful applications are made possible by the system's highly accurate long reads and simplified by this new primer design tool. These research applications include ultra deep sequencing for detection of low-frequency somatic mutations in cancer samples, discovery of rare variants in HIV infected individuals, analysis of exon sequences of disease-associated regions, identified by whole genome association studies and sequencing of 16S ribosomal RNA regions to characterize the microbial abundance and diversity in metagenomic samples. ddn 


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