Kiel University Hospital to investigate up to 2000 single nucleotide polymorphisms for associations with chronic intestinal inflammation, in particular Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis
Applied Biosystems and the University Hospital in Kiel in Germany have announced a collaborative study on high throughput genotyping led by Stefan Schreiber, professor of medicine and gastroenterology.
Up to 2000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in approximately 5000 individuals will be investigated in the course of the research study using the local high throughput SNP genotyping infrastructure to identify if any have associations with chronic intestinal inflammation, in particular Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.
In the past, Professor Schreiber's research group has examined a large number of genes for disease associations on various chromosomes and was among those who described the first Crohn's disease susceptibility gene, NOD2, on chromosome 16.
This new study, which will use an approach called high-density association mapping, will attempt to define further interacting disease genes in this polygenetic disorder.
The study has received considerable support from the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), the German National Genome Network, and the German Crohns and Colitis Foundation, who helped assemble the patient database for the project.
Professor Schreiber is one of the first users of Applied Biosystems' recently introduced Assay-by-Design service, where individual assay kits for known SNPs are designed and tested to order.
This approach can save time, money and manual labour and, when used in combination with the ABI Prism 7900HT sequence detection system, can help researchers analyse up to 250,000 genotypes a day.
