Agilent Technologies Licenses SureFISH to BioDiscovery

Agilent Technologies Inc. has announced that it has entered into a licensing agreement with BioDiscovery, Inc., enabling BioDiscovery customers to access Agilent SureFISH probes directly from BioDiscovery's Nexus software.

Researchers using a variety of cytogenetic microarray platforms can now quickly identify aberrations via Nexus and immediately identify/link to available oligonucleotide-based fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) probes for follow-up studies.

"We are pleased to provide this comprehensive real-time solution to cytogenetic researchers," said Kathleen Shelton, Agilent's director of marketing for genomics.

Shelton continued, "This cooperative agreement demonstrates yet another way researchers can leverage our comprehensive, user-friendly SureFISH platform, allowing them to complete their studies more efficiently and effectively than before."

Agilent's SureFISH probes are designed for specific, nonrepetitive regions of the genome, enabling users to detect repetitive/aberrant regions as small as 50 kb. This design also reduces the hybridization time to as little as four hours.

With a continuously growing menu of SureFISH translocation probes, all centromere probes, 35 telomere probes, and more than 400 general-purpose probes, BioDiscovery customers will be able to efficiently identify probes of interest without having to search external websites and catalogs.

"BioDiscovery Nexus users deal with the full spectrum of cytogenetic platforms," said BioDiscovery vice president for business development Louis Culot.

Culot continued, "We are excited to be able to connect SureFISH seamlessly with Nexus, directing users to probes of interest while they conduct their sample analyses."