Aviva Systems Biology, a privately held San Diego firm, last week launched a custom service based around its Chromatin Immunoprecipitation — Guided Ligation and Selection (ChIP-GLAS) technology, a method for genome-wide detection of promoters and enhancers that interact with proteins or carry modifications that affect gene expression.
Researchers can send Aviva their cell or tissue samples or chromatin-immunoprecipitated DNA samples, and in return, receive a list of potentially enriched genes, the company said. The company did not discuss pricing for the service.
The launch of the service coincides with the launch of similar offerings from firms offering microarray-based ChIP services, including fellow San Diegan firm Genpathway, which launched its own ChIP-on-chip service on the Affymetrix platform this month (see BAN 8/1/2006).
Aviva marketing director Cynthia Lane told BioArray News this week that the service signals a shift in the company’s approach to the market, as it moves from selling the ChIP-GLAS platform to a services model in an attempt to lure more pharmaceutical and academic customers.
“In the past we have offered kits and slides for the customers to perform the analysis themselves. However, several customers requested that we provide a service,” she said.
Lane said that the company provides customers who send in ChIP samples with raw and normalized data as well as “preliminary analysis” from the ChIP-GLAS system.
Lane said that ChIP-GLAS uses an in-house developed oligonucleotide microarray containing 40-mer regions of 20,000 human promoters to focus on specific regions of interest where only the DNA sequence of interest is amplified.
Lane added that the ChIP-GLAS service is also suitable for methylation and chromatin modification studies “using an antibody which recognizes those modifications.”
Aviva is currently offering ChIP-GLAS for human studies, and Lane said that the company is preparing to add a service for ChIP-GLAS-based mouse studies using an array with 8,000 mouse promoters.