Illumina has unveiled the Humanomniexpress+ Custom Beadchip (Omniexpress+), an enhancement to the Omniexpress Beadchip.
Omniexpress+ leverages the Iselect custom genotyping infrastructure to provide researchers with flexibility in adding custom content for disease or pathway-specific markers, rare variants from the 1,000 Genomes Project or panels for fine mapping onto an optimal set of SNPs.
The Humanomniexpress+ Custom Beadchip offers industry-standard data quality ensured by the Infinium assay, flexible content design and high-throughput capabilities supported by a multi-sample Beadchip.
Similar to researchers currently using Iselect, Omniexpress+ users will have access to Illumina's assay design software for seamless content design, ensuring a good assay success rate without the need to pre-screen.
Together with the Iscan system and an eight-sample array format, the Omniexpress+ enables the processing of more than 900 samples per week.
As with Omniexpress, the foundation of the markers on the Omniexpress+ is a subset of the content powering Illumina's flagship GWAS product, the Humanomni1-Quad, and includes an optimised set of SNPs chosen from all three phases of the International Hapmap Project.
Researchers starting with Omniexpress+ can take advantage of future supplemental Omni Beadchips containing new content derived from the 1,000 Genomes Project.
As with all Infinium HD products, the Omniexpress Beadchip supports copy-number variation analyses for disease-association studies and is compatible with Illumina's automation solutions.
First customer shipments of the Humanomniexpress+ Custom Beadchip are expected in the second quarter of 2010.
