NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) - Affymetrix said today that it is working on a new technology that combines DNA sequencing and microarrays.
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Speaking at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco today, Stephen Fodor, Affy's chairman and CEO, said the company will deploy enzymatic sequencing reactions directly on arrays that have captured portions of the genome, using new chemistry that "allows us to use both polymerase and ligase labeling reactions."
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During the presentation, which was webcast, Fodor said the new technology is "one of the reasons why we acquired USB" - the reagent firm that Affymetrix purchased last month for $75 million.
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USB, based in Cleveland, Ohio, sells molecular biology and biochemical reagent products. In 1980, the company commercialized Sequenase DNA polymerase and DNA sequencing kits.
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Fodor did not provide further details on the sequencing chemistry used for the new system, or when Affy plans to make a sequencing product or service available.
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He said in a Q&A session following the presentation that the "enzymatic sequence data" the technology will provide will be applied to new array products in the future.
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Fodor also mentioned that Affy plans to launch a set of ultra-high-resolution copy number variation CHIPS during the first half of this year. Each of the three chips in the set will have 10 million 50-mer probes across the non-redundant part of the human genome, covering 1.5 billion bases in total.