Genpathway will provide ChIP-on-Chip assay services to researchers using the Affymetrix GeneChip tiling array system, Genpathway said last week.
Under the worldwide services agreement, Genpathway will provide clients with TranscriptionPath ChIP-on-Chip/Tiling, FactorPath ChIP-on-Chip/Tiling, and FactorPath ChIP-on-Chip/Promoter services.
Genpathway entered the market as a ChIP-on-chip service provider in 2004. According to the firm’s Chief Scientific Officer Mary Warren, access to Affy’s tiling arrays will supplement the company’s discovery service. ChIP-on-chip will be initially offered for human and mouse studies.
“The first mode that we have is query mode, where we are using quantitative PCR to quantify either the factor binding to certain regions or the transcription levels of the genes themselves. This relies on the customer having certain specific regions that they want to look at specifically,” Warren told BioArray News last week.
“Now with ChIP-on-chip we are teaming up with Affymetrix for the whole-genome tiling arrays or we can do the hybridization to the promoter arrays,” she said. “We are essentially asking again where those binding sites [are] or where … the genes undergoing transcription [are]. It is very similar to [the] discovery approach we’ve offered.”
Warren said that Genpathway’s services fill a hole in the marketplace for a ChIP-on-chip analysis service. Other companies that offer a ChIP-on-chip service, like NimbleGen, provide customers with the raw data rather than analyzing it.
It is unclear how many other Affymetrix service providers are offering ChIP-on-chip analysis. Of the 42 service providers listed on Affy’s website, only two advertise ChIP-on-chip analysis using its platform — Genpathway and AROS Applied Biotechnology in Aarhus, Denmark.
An Affymetrix spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company is expecting more ChIP-on-chip service deals for its tiling array portfolio.
Carol Turchin, head of business development at Genpathway, told BioArray News last week that the firm’s customers currently include pharma, biotechs, agribusiness, government agencies, and academic researchers.
Financial terms of the agreement with Affy were not disclosed.