Clinical researchers at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, will use Roche and Caliper Life Sciences' combined automated target enrichment platform for a new 3,000-sample exome sequencing study, the partners said this week.
Under the agreement, the Genetic Laboratory of the Department of Internal Medicine at EUMC will use the combined Roche-Caliper offering as part of a new phase of the Rotterdam Study, a large, prospective human epidemiological cohort to characterize and analyze age-related disorders and their risk factors.
The study includes 15,000 participants 45 years or older who have been followed since 1990. A major focus of the study has been the identification of genetic risk factors for age-related disorders such as osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, and type 2 diabetes.
To accommodate the vast amounts of data, the group established a genome-wide association study database in 2007. By combining Roche’s exome capture product, the NimbleGen SeqCap EZ Exome Library, with Caliper's Sciclone NGS Workstation, the EUMC team now hopes to unearth additional data using exome sequencing.
The group said that it anticipates completing this phase of the project in the next three to four months.
Roche and Caliper began partnering in July to develop and optimize automated protocols for the NimbleGen SeqCap EZ Library on Caliper's Sciclone NGS.