NEW YORK, Sept. 26 – A unit of Pyrosequencing and a researcher with the Scottish Meningococcus and Pneumococcus Reference Laboratory have formed a research collaboration to characterize the bacterium Neisseria meningitidis , Pyrosequencing said on Wednesday.
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
“Our laboratory was the first in the world to automate the sequence typing procedure that is routinely used in Scotland to genotype Neisseria meningitidis ," said Stuart Clarke, director of the Scottish Meningococcus and Pneumococcus Reference Laboratory, in Glasgow. "As leaders in the area of genotyping automation … will be able to rapidly genotype strains of the bacteria and develop tests to trace outbreaks of disease as well as to advance important epidemiology studies."
The research collaboration will use Pyrosequencing’s Molecular Diagnostics unit’s PSQ 96 system to develop new genotyping applications that can identify and distinguish N. meningitidis in clinical samples, the company said.
The partners will then perform validation studies to compare a large number of clinical samples that have been analyzed by traditional methods with those analyzed using Pyrosequencing technology. The genotyping analysis will detect both SNPs and short sequence stretches in N. meningitidis genes.