Affy Supplying Its 500K Arrays to Public Gene Variant Study

BOSTON, May 5 (GenomeWeb News) - Affymetrix is providing its 500K mapping arrays to an international consortium that is cataloging large-scale gene variants, a consortium leader told GenomeWeb News today.

Steven Scherer, director of The Center for Applied Genomics at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, said Affy recently joined the consortium, which includes researchers from Brigham & Women's ChildrenHospital, Harvard medical School, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He spoke with GenomeWeb News at Cambridge Health Institute's Microarrays in Medicine Conference, here this week. He said Affy began supplying its array over the past two months.

According to Scherer, whose lab is an existing Affy customer, the microarray giant is providing its 500K mapping arrays to help the group genotype a diverse cohort of individuals in order to develop a database of nucleotide copy variations. The large-scale copy variations in the human genome that scientists believe account for the differences in individuals will be added to TCAG's publicly accessible Genome Variation Database. 

Scherer said Affy was running the experiments and HapMap samples in-house, and that the consortium approached Affy because they "wanted to try their 500K SNP chip."

Affy will join the nascent collaborative at an invitation-only meeting in July in Toronto, Scherer said.