Illumina announces HumanOmniExpress+ Custom BeadChip

Illumina today unveiled its new HumanOmniExpress+ Custom BeadChip, an enhancement to the recently announced OmniExpress BeadChip, which allows for the addition of up to 200,000 custom variants for a total of >900k variants per sample.

OmniExpress+ uses the iSelect custom genotyping infrastructure to provide researchers with the ability to add custom content for disease or pathway-specific markers, rare variants from the 1,000 Genomes Project, or panels for fine-mapping onto the industry's most optimal set of SNPs.

"The OmniExpress+ continues Illumina's tradition of supporting semi-custom products, joining the ranks of the 300-Duo+, 550-Quad+ and many others," said Jay Flatley, president and CEO of Illumina.

"This addition to our family of third generation arrays leverages our many years of successful custom genotyping projects. The ability to add 3,000 to 200,000 custom variants to the standard OmniExpress provides tremendous flexibility to researchers while accessing the most optimal set of SNPs currently available for genome-wide association studies."

Together with the iScan System and an 8-sample array format, the OmniExpress+ enables the processing of more than 900 samples per week.

Like OmniExpress, the foundation of the markers on the OmniExpress+ is a subset of the content powering Illumina's 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.

The OmniExpress BeadChip supports copy number variation (CNV) analyses for disease-association studies and is compatible with Illumina's automation solutions.

First shipments of the HumanOmniExpress+ Custom BeadChip are expected in the second quarter of 2010.