NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Roche today said that it will collaborate with SeqWright and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine on identifying possible genetic variants associated with dilated cardiomyopathy.
The collaboration will employ NimbleGen's Sequence Capture Human Exome Arrays to enrich more than 180,000 exons from DNA samples taken from people with dilated cardiomyopathy, said Roche. SeqWright will sequence the enriched exons using 454 Life Sciences' Genome Sequencer FLX to detect SNPS, insertions, and deletions.
The collaboration is part of a 15-year study of familial dilated cardiomyopathy being conducted at the Miller School of Medicine.
"We know that familial dilated cardiomyopathy can be explained by mutations in more than 20 autosomal and two X-linked genes, yet mutations in these genes account for only one-third of the cause," Nadine Norton, a research assistant professor at the Miller School of Medicine, said in a statement. "By using an experimental strategy that employs the sequencing of all coding regions within the human genome, we hope to identify other mutations in other genes that cause this terrible disease."