Roche NimbleGen, a company of Roche Applied Science launched its NimbleGen Sequence Capture technology for selecting targeted regions of the genome for high throughput sequencing. This new technology enables researchers to capture up to five million targeted bases from the human or mouse genomes.

The technology addresses a bottleneck that lies in the sample preparation process, where researchers want to sample a small, relevant portion of a genome and sequence. Regions of interest are selectively sampled through a process whereby individual fragments are amplified using polymerase chain reaction. Since a unique reaction is required for each fragment, the selection of large genomic regions requires the parallel design, optimization, and execution of up to thousands of individual reactions. The NimbleGen Sequence Capture service addresses this bottleneck by offering flexibility with custom designs targeting contiguous or dispersed genomic regions.

www.nimblegen.com

This article was published in Drug Discovery & Development magazine: Vol. 11, No. 7, July, 2008, pp. 23.