Molecular Genetics Core Facility at Children’s Hospital Boston Selects HybSelect from febit for Targeted Resequencing

The Molecular Genetics Core Facility (MGCF) at Children’s Hospital Boston chose febit’s HybSelect technology which will enable genetics researchers to conduct the highly economic targeted enrichment of genes of interest for resequencing. In January the core facility will be receiving the Geniom RT Analyzer® from febit to perform HybSelect.

“We feel that febit’s HybSelect technology will be a powerful tool for our researchers, in conjunction with our Applied Biosystems SOLiD platform, at a reasonable cost,” said Hal Schneider, Core Manager of the MGCF. “The ease and flexibility of HybSelect allows us to study a variety of genetic diseases and multiplex bar-coded libraries, making sequence capture projects much more accessible and affordable for our investigators.”

The economy of HybSelect increases the potential for widespread use of next generation sequencing in clinical studies. Instead of sequencing the complete genomes of only a few patients, HybSelect enables the analysis of specific genes of interest from large patient cohorts for the same price and data management effort. The larger patient pool now provides the statistically relevant data that are necessary for clinical studies.

Peer Staehler, CSO at febit, said: “Targeted enrichment and multiplexing are necessary to truly benefit from the advantages of high performance sequencers, and febit has developed HybSelect to meet this need. Together with Life Technologies’ SOLiD 3, HybSelect can sequence 16 parallel samples in one run. febit is currently working on an upgrade to a 96-plex barcode set. This will enable sequencing of 2,304 samples in six working days.”