This story was originally published on July 20.
Fluidigm said today that a genomics core facility at France's Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, or INRA, has purchased a Fluidigm BioMark system to provide genetic analysis services to its core facility customers.
Fluidigm said that the INRA facility, called the Genotoul genomics platform, will use the BioMark system to provide services such as SNP genotyping, gene expression analysis, and digital PCR quantification of DNA libraries for next-generation sequencing.
The Genotoul genomics platform is located on INRA's Auzeville-Tolosane campus. Founded in 2000, it is one of the three founding platforms of the Genopole Toulouse-Midi Pyrénées, which provides a regional network of life sciences research facilities for both public and private sector groups.
According to a Fluidigm spokesperson, the INRA facility is the first in France to have purchased a BioMark system. Researchers there have been validating the performance of the BioMark system on several projects over the past year, Fluidigm said.
"We have used the BioMark system for many different applications and have found the results to be very robust and comparable to those obtained using classical techniques," Denis Milan, group leader of the Department of Animal Genetics at INRA, said in a statement.
"However, this platform allows us to provide researchers with a lot more high-quality data, in a fraction of the time, at a very affordable cost," Milan added.
Fluidigm said that BioMark has already been used in a European Commission program called Diogenes, in which researchers used the system to analyze the expression of 288 genes in 1,500 adipose tissue samples from obese subjects undergoing dietary interventions.
"We are confident that this approach will be a major step forward in the characterization of biomarkers of obesity complications," said Dominique Langin, head of the National Institute of Health and Medical Research.
BioMark is a high-throughput genetic analysis system that enables applications such as disease tissue profiling, single-cell gene expression, genotyping, and absolute quantification using digital PCR.
The system processes and analyzes samples contained on Fluidigm's 96.96 DynamicArray integrated fluidic circuit chips, which can provide researchers with 9,216 real-time data points, or 24 times the number of reads provided by a 384-well plate.