The NMD-Chip Consortium has selected Roche Nimblegen microarrays to accelerate and simplify genetic research of neuromuscular disorders (NMD).
The NMD-Chip Consortium, an initiative of the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, is comprised of 13 European entities from eight countries whose goal is to further our understanding of NMDs and to investigate the possibilities of developing a faster, more cost-effective investigation and diagnosis in the future.
Inherited NMDs form a large and diverse group of genetic diseases that cause progressive degeneration of the muscles and/or motor nerves that control movements.
An estimated one out of 1,000 people may have a disabling inherited NMD.
The NMD-Chip Consortium aims to foster the research on NMDs by using a gene candidate approach to assess known forms as well as to characterise unknown forms of these disorders.
The consortium will use custom-designed Nimblegen Human CGH (comparative genomic hybridisation) 12 x 135K microarrays to enable them to locate gene- and exon-level rearrangements, deletions, or insertions associated with a specific NMD, namely Duchenne/Becker muscular dystrophies, limb girdle muscular dystrophies, congenital muscular dystrophies, and hereditary motor-sensory neuropathies or Charcot-Marie-Tooth neuropathies.
These high-throughput CGH arrays will speed discovery by allowing 12 research samples to be processed at the same time on a single array, which will also reduce the cost per sample.
In addition, the consortium will use customised Nimblegen Human Sequence Capture 385K arrays to capture DNA fragments of all known genes implied in a given group of NMDs.
This technology, when coupled with high-throughput sequencing such as 454 sequencing, will provide quick evaluation of the gene variation underlying the NMDs being researched.
