Researchers are using a nucleic acid fragment analysis system to identify novel genetic polymorphisms linked to osteoporosis and cardiovascular disease
Andreas Kindmark from the Department of Medical Sciences, Uppsala University Hospital, said: "We use the Transgenomic Wave system for association studies, looking at candidate genes that are already known and screening for others that we think might also be involved.
We now achieve a much higher throughput using the Wave instrument and pooling DNA samples than we could before with DNA sequencing." The instrument was chosen on the recommendation of fellow researchers already working with a Wave system in a neighbouring laboratory.
Dr Kindmark added: "I had also heard good things about the Wave system from colleagues at various SNP conferences I have attended." "The support from Transgenomic and Medprobe (Transgenomic's Scandinavian distributors) has been very good.
We had some problems in the summer and turned to them for help.
They came back to us the same day and correctly suggested that it may be a problem with the DMSO we were using to optimise the PCR, so we were able to put things right straight away."
