Illumina to Develop Custom SNP BeadChip for Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

NEW YORK, Sept. 28 (GenomeWeb News) - Illumina will develop a custom SNP-genotyping BeadChip for the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortium, the company said today.

The custom Sentrix BeadChip will analyze so-called non-synonymous SNPs that cause amino acid changes in proteins. The chip, to be called cSNP-6 BeadChip, will allow researchers to study 15,000 SNPs on six samples simultaneously, using Illumina's Infinium assay. Its content will be derived from the HapMap project, of which Illumina and the WTSI are participants.

Researchers at the WTSI plan to use the chips to genotype more than 5,000 samples by the end of the year to study four common disease phenotypes. Following this project, Illumina intends to commercialize the microarray and will make its content available at that time.