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Lucigen, Thermo Fisher Team on Mate Pair Kits for Ion Torrent PGM

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Lucigen announced yesterday that it has partnered with Thermo Fisher Scientific to develop and launch a long mate pair library kit for the Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine sequencing platform.

The Ion TrueMate Library Kit will extend the platform's capabilities, enabling long mate pair libraries of up to 8 kb to be run on the PGM. Lucigen said that it used its NxSeq mate pair technology to develop the kit, and it includes a protocol and reagents that have been optimized to eliminate chimera formation.

"Existing mate pair libraries contain a high percentage of chimeras that result in misassembled genomes," Lucigen CEO and Founder David Mead said in a statement. "The mate pairs that are obtained from the TrueMate libraries achieve [greater than 90 percent] efficiency, and when combined with Ion Fragment libraries, have shown tremendous promise for closing genomes, finishing BAC sequences, and obtaining accurate scaffold assemblies."

The Ion TrueMate Library Kit will be sold for the PGM platform exclusively by Thermo Fisher. Lucigen added that it will perform library creation and provide sequencing services for customers globally.

Further terms of the alliance were not disclosed.

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