Providing Cost-Effec?tive Capture of Defined Genomic Regions

 Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT), the world leader in oligonucleotide synthesis, provides researchers in Prof Jeffrey Barrick’s laboratory (University of Texas at Austin, USA) with its xGEN Lockdown Probes for target enrichment of specific gene regions.

Detailed in the DECODED quarterly newsletter from IDT, Prof Barrick’s research team is developing methods to track rare mutations in evolving populations to assess effects on fitness from sequence alone. Through the use of the xGEN Lockdown Probes, the research team obtained greater depth of coverage, sequencing only the regions of interest. As a result, the volume of data they collected and their subsequent data analysis were reduced, while the researchers saved on the cost of sequencing reagents.

Dr Daniel Deatherage, a postdoctoral associate in the Barrick laboratory, commented: “One of the nice things about the IDT probes is that we could start from a single biotinylated probe and expand to a whole pool of the xGEN Lockdown Probes.” xGEN Lockdown Probes are individually synthesised and assessed by mass spectroscopy for quality control, enabling a seamless transition from discovery to clinical application.