Agilent Technologies has introduced the Sureselect Human All Exon v2 Target Enrichment kit for use in cancer and heritable disease studies.
The kit was developed in collaboration with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
It is a single-tube assay that allows researchers to streamline experiments by sequencing the expressed genome while discarding regions not of interest.
Agilent said the Sureselect platform is proven to enable genetic discovery, evidenced by recent discoveries into Mendelian diseases and heritable cancer.
The company offers three All Exon designs: two developed with the Broad Institute and one developed with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Gencode.
The original Agilent Human All Exon Target Enrichment kit was introduced in September 2009.
The new 38-megabase (Mb) kit design adds content recently determined to be in the expressed genome.
This content is also found in Agilent's second product targeting the Sureselect Human All Exon 50Mb kit, developed in partnership with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Gencode.
Sheila Fisher, assistant director of technology development for the Genome Sequencing Center at the Broad Institute, said: 'The Broad Institute has been utilising this updated version of the Human All Exon kit for several months and it works very well in our production pipeline.
'We have used this kit to successfully target and sequence the exomes of more than 5,100 human samples from a variety of cancer and heritable disease studies,' she added.
The Sureselect Human All Exon v2 kit design covers: 99.01 per cent of human exons defined by the NCBI Consensus CDS Database from September 2009; 93.29 per cent of Refseq genes; 95.07 per cent of Refseq transcripts from June 2010; and 90 per cent of miRNA in miRBase v14.
The kit targets just over 38Mb of the human genome in a single-tube reaction.
In addition to the new content, teams at the Broad Institute and Agilent have carefully re-balanced the mixture of probes to maximise capture efficiency and uniformity across the exome.
Agilent's Sureselect Target Enrichment System offers a broad range of target enrichment products and highly optimised protocols for a diverse set of sequencing methods and platforms.
There are now 15 products in the Sureselect portfolio, with more in development.
Sureselect products are available for enrichment of target sizes ranging from smaller than 200Kb to more than 50Mb in a single tube.
Protocols now support Illumina end sequencing, paired-end sequencing and indexing protocols in addition to fragment library format, paired-end sequencing and barcoding on the Solid system.
Users of Agilent's eArray xD desktop design tool can improve the efficiency of their research by designing custom products to target any genome of interest, all in a single tube.
Agilent also offers the eArray online design tool, enabling users to customise pre-defined Sureselect kits such as the Sureselect Human All Exon series of products.
