NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — The University of New Hampshire and ZS Genetics have extended by three years an alliance to harness electron microscopy to sequence DNA.
Under the agreement, UNH and ZS Genetics will continue their year-old collaboration, Thomas Abert, ZSG’s vice president of finance and administration, told GenomeWeb Daily News today.
Abert said that under the collaboration, UNH will provide much of the wet lab work and assist with labeling needs.
Founded in 2003, Massachusetts-based ZS Genetics believes that electron microscopes could become a fast and cost-effective way to sequence DNA. The technology it is developing uses iodine to label components with atomic weights otherwise too low to be seen by electron microscopes.
Abert said the company’s methods will “cut down the cost of performing sequencing of a genome because of the simplicity of the process,” and because the imaging will allow researchers to sequence 5,000 to 10,000 base pairs at a time.
Financial terms of the agreement were not released.