454 Life Sciences, a Roche company, has made a new GS GType HLA Primer Sets available for use with the company’s benchtop GS Junior and GS FLX next-generation sequencing systems.
454 Life Sciences said the kits are the first in a series of research assays in the areas of immunogenetics, infectious disease, and cancer to be launched for use with 454 Sequencing Systems, allowing researchers to easily integrate the platforms into application-specific laboratory workflows.
The long, clonal reads provided by 454 Sequencing Systems enable straightforward high-resolution human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing of multiple samples at a time and, in many cases, achieve unambiguous allele identification within a single sequencing run, the company said.
Children’s Hospital & Research Center Oakland HLA/Immunogenetics Laboratory director Elizabeth Trachtenberg said using this approach, high-resolution allele assignment can be obtained in approximately one-third the time necessary using Sanger-based methods.
Roche Molecular Systems Department of Human Genetics director Henry Erlich said the ability to quickly achieve such high accuracy and resolution will have a significant impact on research and, ultimately, on clinical application of HLA typing.