Agilent Technologies introduces SureSelect Human All Exon v2 Target Enrichment kit for cancer assay

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) today introduced the SureSelect Human All Exon v2 Target Enrichment kit, which was developed in close collaboration with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The kit, the 15^th SureSelect product in Agilent's portfolio, is a single tube assay that allows researchers to streamline experiments by sequencing the expressed genome while discarding regions not of interest.

“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.”

The SureSelect platform is well-proven for enabling genetic discovery, evidenced by recent key discoveries into Mendelian diseases and heritable cancer. This year alone, the SureSelect Target Enrichment System has been cited in eight papers covering research into a wide range of heritable disorders.

Agilent offers an industry-leading 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 also is found in Agilent's second product targeting the human exome, the SureSelect Human All Exon 50 Mb kit, developed in partnership with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Gencode.

"We are happy with the most recent outcome of our long-standing collaboration with Agilent," said Stacey Gabriel, Ph.D., co-director of the Genome Sequencing Center at the Broad Institute. "At Broad, we are continually developing our protocols to improve performance and enable the most efficient discoveries in human genetics. This new product from Agilent is just one of several anticipated improvements we will make available with Agilent to geneticists."

"The Broad Institute has been utilizing this updated version of the Human All Exon kit for several months, and it works very well in our production pipeline," added Sheila Fisher, assistant director of Technology Development for the Genome Sequencing Center at the Broad Institute. "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."

"The Broad Institute worked with us to define the first version of the SureSelect Human All Exon kit," said Emily M. LeProust, Ph.D., Agilent director of Genomics Application Development, "and has continued this relationship to further define and improve the performance of this already powerful capture technology. We believe that it will continue to be a highly useful research tool for discovery of mutations linked to heritable disease and cancer."

The SureSelect Human All Exon v2 kit design covers:

• 99.01 percent of human exons defined by the NCBI Consensus CDS Database from September 2009;
• 93.29 percent of RefSeq genes;
• 95.07 percent of RefSeq transcripts from June 2010; and
• 90 percent of miRNA in miRBase v14.

The kit targets just over 38 Mb 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 maximize capture efficiency and uniformity across the exome.

Agilent's SureSelect Target Enrichment System offers the broadest range of target enrichment products and the most highly optimized protocols for a diverse set of sequencing methods and platforms. There are now 15 products in the SureSelect portfolio, with many more in development. SureSelect products are available for enrichment of target sizes ranging from smaller than 200 Kb to more than 50 Mb 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 easily 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 customize pre-defined SureSelect kits such as the SureSelect Human All Exon series of products.