Roche NimbleGen Launches NimbleGen Sequence Capture Technology for Targeted Genome Resequencing

Roche NimbleGen, a company of Roche Applied Science announced the commercial launch of its NimbleGen Sequence Capture technology for scientists interested in selecting targeted regions of the genome for high-throughput sequencing.

This technology enables researchers to capture up to five million targeted bases from the human or mouse genomes, according to company.

The technology addresses a major bottleneck faced by researchers when trying to sequence large or multiple genomic regions. The bottleneck lies in the sample preparation process, where researchers want to sample only a small, relevant portion of a genome and sequence using next-generation technologies such as Roche’s 454 Genome Sequencer FLX system.

The length of the captured sample fragments, coupled with the long-read technology of the 454 Sequencing system, enables aplotyping and provides full information on variants, such as insertions, deletions, and SNPs.

Currently, regions of interest are selectively sampled through a labor-intensive process whereby individual fragments are individually amplified using polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Since a reaction is required for each fragment, the selection of large genomic regions requires the parallel design, optimization and execution of up to thousands of individual reactions, representing a substantial investment in time and money.

The NimbleGen Sequence Capture service is the first commercially available solution that specifically addresses this sample preparation bottleneck. This technology offers maximum flexibility with custom tailored designs targeting either contiguous or dispersed genomic regions and saves substantial time and cost when compared to PCR-based methods.

Researchers around the world have awaited the availability of this revolutionary technology with great excitement. “What's happening today with regard to Sequence Capture is reminiscent of the early days of PCR, the same sense that all of a sudden your field has changed, and all that constrains you is your imagination about how you should now be designing experiments,” said John Greally, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Molecular Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “Occasionally a technical advance lives up to its billing as transformative. This seems to be one of those occasions.”

The initial offering of this technology is as a service, and Roche NimbleGen plans to make NimbleGen Sequence Capture arrays and related reagents and instruments available soon to customers worldwide so that the technology can be used in every researcher’s laboratory.