Applied Biosystems Enters New Era Of Life-Science Research With Launch Of Next-Generation DNA Sequencing Platform

San Diego, CA - Applied Biosystems , an Applera Corporation business, recently entered a new era of life-science research by announcing the worldwide commercial availability of the SOLiD System, the company's highly anticipated next-generation DNA sequencing platform. The SOLiD System is already enabling new ways of performing genetic analysis applications, which may set new standards for how scientists are able to approach complex challenges associated with understanding the biological basis for health and disease. The company made the announcement today at the 57th annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics.

This new era of life-science research calls for technologies that can help scientists to cost-effectively identify how genetic variation and patterns of gene expression contribute to disease, and the manner in which individual genotypes impact how people may respond to various treatments. The SOLiD System is distinguished by unparalleled throughput, scalability, accuracy, and application flexibility that set new expectations of discovery for researchers striving to conduct a wide range of applications.

The company began an early-access program for the SOLiD System in June of this year. Since then, the platform has improved throughput 4-fold and increased read lengths by 40%. The current system is capable of delivering up to 4 billion bases of sequence data per run, establishing it as the highest throughput next-generation sequencing platform available today. Data accuracy, another critical performance metric, remains at the highest level of accuracy among next-generation systems. Higher throughput and higher data accuracy result in lower costs for sequencing projects. As part of its early-access program, Applied Biosystems worked closely with customers and collaborators to expand the variety of applications now supported by the system.

"In the new era of next-generation life sciences, higher-throughput sequencing technologies with application flexibility should enable researchers to use a single system to make meaningful associations between variations in the kinds and amounts of DNA sequences and disease," said Shaf Yousaf, president for Applied Biosystems' molecular and cell biology systems division. "New approaches to studying genetic variation are expected to profoundly affect pharmaceutical development programs as researchers study how individual genotypes are linked to how people respond to treatments for disease."

Virtually all human diseases have genetic underpinnings. Currently, researchers studying complex diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease rely on reference human DNA sequences from large-scale DNA sequencing projects to broadly associate genetic variations to these diseases. Scientists also use a variety of methods to associate activity or level of expression of specific genes with characteristics of disease. Although life-science researchers have studied genetic variation and differential gene expression using a wide range of technologies, the use of the SOLiD System is expected to simplify the identification, collection, and analysis of genetic information.

Leading research institutions around the world, including the Hubrecht Institute in The Netherlands, Columbia University, the University of Queensland in Australia, and the University of Tokyo, among others, are already using the SOLiD System to conduct a wide range of applications. These include rare variant detection, epigenetic profiling, transcriptome analysis, and serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE).

SOURCE: Applied Biosystems