Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today announced that its SureSelect Human All Exon Kit is now available for the Applied Biosystems SOLiD System. Applied Biosystems is part of Life Technologies Corp. The kit enables target enrichment prior to next-generation DNA sequencing.

The SureSelect Human All Exon Kit extends the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the SureSelect Target Enrichment System to studies of all human exons, a region totaling approximately 38 Mb. Available in kit sizes appropriate for studies comprised of a few to several thousand samples, Agilent’s in-solution-based SureSelect Target Enrichment System easily scales up and is well-suited for automation.

“We’re excited to extend our next-generation sequencing target enrichment portfolio even further with an optimized protocol for the Applied Biosystems SOLiD System in addition to the protocol for the Illumina GAII which was released last month,” said Fred Ernani, Ph.D., Agilent emerging genomics applications product manager. “The performance, ease of use and scalability of the SureSelect Human All Exon Kit combines well with the increasing capacity and efficiency of both of these next-generation sequencers.”

The SureSelect Human All Exon Kit design covers 1.22 percent of human genomic regions corresponding to the NCBI Consensus CDS Database (CCDS), including more than 700 human miRNAs from the Sanger v13 database and more than 300 additional human non-coding RNAs in a single tube.

“The SureSelect All Exon Kit enrichment for the Applied Biosystems SOLiD System worked in our hands extremely well,” said Dr. Michal Schweiger, MD, Ph.D., Cancer Genomics Group of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics. “The amount of input DNA required is very low and the protocol straightforward to perform. We are very happy about the technology, especially in regard to our applications studying cancer where we have limited amounts of input DNA.”

Agilent’s SureSelect Target Enrichment System 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.

For more information, visit www.opengenomics.com/SureSelect. Find eArray at https://earray.chem.agilent.com.

About Agilent Technologies

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) is the world’s premier measurement company and a technology leader in communications, electronics, life sciences and chemical analysis. The company’s 18,000 employees serve customers in more than 110 countries. Agilent had net revenues of $5.8 billion in fiscal 2008. Information about Agilent is available on the Web at www.agilent.com.

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