Affymetrix Releases its Single Array for Genetic Studies
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Affymetrix Inc. has announced the full commercial launch of its SNP Array 5.0, its single array for genetic studies. Researchers are currently using the SNP Array 5.0 to identify and understand complex diseases such as autism, autoimmunity, bipolar disease, cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
The Affymetrix SNP Array 5.0 features 500,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from the original two-chip 500K Array Set, as well as more than 420,000 additional probes designed to measure other genetic differences, such as copy number variation.
Compared to the 500K Array Set, the SNP Array 5.0 offers customers more than twice the genetic information per array and improves array processing time by more than 25 percent, all for the same price.
Nine high-volume customers have been using the SNP Array 5.0 as part of the product’s limited commercial release. Scientists from the Autism Consortium, the Broad Institute and the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University have been using the SNP Array 5.0 to perform the most comprehensive genetic study on autism, which involves more than 5,000 samples.
“The new SNP Array 5.0 is quickly providing data of superior quality for half the previous effort,” said Aravinda Chakravarti, Ph.D., Henry J. Knott Professor and director of the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.
“The affordable price has translated into our examining a larger number of samples. The autism study, in particular, is one of the first beneficiaries of this new technology,” Chakravarti said.
The Affymetrix SNP Array 5.0 was developed in collaboration with the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"We believe that the future of whole-genome scanning must simultaneously query both SNP and copy number information in a single experiment,” said Stacey Gabriel, Ph.D., director, National Center for Genotyping and Analysis at the Broad. “We are working towards both array-based laboratory methods and algorithmic improvements to make this possible.”
“Although we observed highly concordant data between the Affymetrix SNP Array 5.0 and the 500K Array Set, we found the new SNP Array 5.0 to consistently achieve a higher call rate and require less than half the hands-on time for processing,” said Shawn Levy, Ph.D., director of the Vanderbilt Microarray Shared Resource and Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “Not only is there time savings in the single hybridization compared to two hybridizations, but the overall protocol is more streamlined and efficient.”
