This story was originally published on August 4.
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has collaborated with Agilent Technologies to develop a new version of the SureSelect Human All Exon target enrichment kit, which the company launched commercially last week.
In addition, the institute has "standardized" on the SureSelect in-solution capture method for targeted next-gen sequencing projects, according to Agilent.
Under the collaboration, researchers at the Sanger Institute defined 12 megabases of additional content for Agilent's existing human all-exon kit, increasing its total target to 50 megabases. The Sanger performed the work as part of Gencode, a sub-project of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements project that aims to annotate all evidence-based gene features in the human genome.
Sanger researchers as well as members of the International Cancer Genome Consortium have been using the new SureSelect All Human Exon kit on an early-access basis for about a year.
In the past, researchers have complained that current exome-capture products from both Agilent and Roche NimbleGen either do not include or only inefficiently capture many medically relevant genes (IS 6/29/2010). The new product appears to address these concerns.
Earlier this week, Roche NimbleGen said that the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine is using its exome capture products and has established a pipeline for high-throughput exome capture and sequencing (IS 8/3/2010).