Illumina last week launched its Sentrix HumanHap650Y BeadChip, that covers all four populations studied by the International HapMap Project including the Yoruba of Nigeria.
The Yoruba population is very genetically diverse, and demands a higher number of SNPs than less-diverse, younger populations, like Europeans, to achieve equivalent genomic coverage, Illumina said.
The HumanHap650Y BeadChip contains over 650,000 SNP markers. The company said that the chip will be used by Duke University's Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology to analyze a 2,000-sample cohort of HIV-exposed African individuals that are and are not infected with the virus in order to identify gene variants that confer either resistance or susceptibility to infection.