Agilent's Target Enrichment System Supports Barcoding and Indexing to Speed Sequencing, Reduce Sequencing Costs Up to 16-Fold

We originally designed the Agilent SureSelect Target Enrichment System to enable geneticists to efficiently analyze larger numbers of samples by sequencing just the genomic regions of interest, said Fred Ernani, Ph.D., Agilent marketing manager, Emerging Genomic Applications. Agilent SureSelect's new multiplexing capability extends this benefit by dramatically reducing costs and significantly increasing throughput without sacrificing data quality.

Protocols are robust and easy to follow, enabling multiple samples to be run together, but their data to be analyzed separately. The kits are optimized for the Illumina Genome Analyzer and the Applied Biosystems SOLiD platform. The Illumina can sequence 12 samples per lane for a total of 96 samples per run. The SOLiD platform can sequence 16 samples per quadrant or octet, allowing up to 256 samples to be processed per run.

The first Agilent SureSelect products available with multiplexing capabilities are custom kits designed with eArray; Agilent's Web-based microarray and the Agilent SureSelect design tool. The kits are packaged in a variety of sizes, ranging from 10 to 5,000 reactions per custom kit. Having kits of different sizes allows researchers to use the same technology for small initial investigations as well as large profiling studies, all with the same product format that is amenable to automation. New kits composed of predefined content will be available in multiplexing format later this year.

Several customers are testing Agilent SureSelect products supporting indexing and barcoding, and are pleased with the performance they are getting, said Ernani.

The Agilent SureSelect Target Enrichment System, employing a method licensed from the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, is now the platform with the most optimized protocols for a diverse set of sequencing protocols and platforms. It supports Illumina end-sequencing and paired-end sequencing protocols in addition to fragment library format sequencing on the SOLiD System. Users of Agilent's eArray online 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.