NEW YORK, Nov. 18 (GenomeWeb News) - CuraGen subsidiary 454 Life Sciences is offering a glimpse of one aspect of its next-generation sequencing technology, which has been under development - and under wraps - since 454's spin-out in 2000. The company said today that it has published its method to amplify genome fragments for sequencing in its massively parallel platform.
The paper, published in the journal Electrophoresis and titled "A massively parallel PicoTiterPlate based platform for discrete picoliter-scale polymerase chain reactions," describes the amplification component of the company's proprietary solid-phase sequencing technology.
In the paper, the authors demonstrate simultaneous PCR amplification of several hundred thousand discrete reactions in 454's PicoTiterPlate platform. The company said the platform uses microfluidic reaction wells, each with a volume of 75 picoliters, which should greatly speed sample pereparation times for large-scale sequencing projects.
Richard Begley, CEO of 454 Life Sciences, said that the company is preparing the product for commercialization in 2004.