Collaboration agreement to develop and validate a genetic marker panel builds on success of of platform in scrapie susceptibility testing
LGC, an independent provider of analytical and diagnostic services, has announced a collaboration agreement with Sequenom to develop and validate a genetic marker panel for paternity and forensic identification.
Successful results will enable LGC to use the validated panel of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) assays on Sequenom's Massarray platform to provide paternity and forensic testing services.
LGC, a long-established provider of paternity testing and forensic DNA analysis services, is always at the forefront of cultivating the potential of new technologies and introducing them into the mainstream.
It was LGC's research and validation work in the late 1990s of the then cutting-edge STR DNA profiling technique (short tandem repeats) that established STR as the industry norm for paternity testing.
Alongside these applications, LGC established Sequenom's Massarray platform as the core technology for its high-throughput SNP analysis facility, which has been instrumental in the UK's National Scrapie Plan.
This project, organised by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), aims to control and eradicate scrapie from the UK sheep population through detection of genetic susceptibility and selective breeding.
The capabilities of the Massarray technology have impressed LGC and led to this latest collaboration to evaluate other applications. "Sequenom's technology allows tremendous flexibility in managing extremely high volumes of time-critical genotyping samples, whether it is for one test on many samples or many different tests on one sample," said Paul Debenham, director of life sciences at LGC.
"By utilising this technology in other diagnostic and genotyping applications, LGC is best placed to meet the future needs of our customers."
