DNAprint Genomics (DNAG)

[mingwan0]

mahastock

My speculative opinion is that, like others, Perlegen have some basic technology that might ultimately be competitive with DNAP. They might also be infringing on our intellectual property. There is a lot of collaboration going on, for instance:

http://www.perlegen.com/newsroom/2004_01_26_Galileo_Press_Release.html

However, there do not seem to be any actual products based on Perlegen's technology. Here is a description of Perlegen's approach from their website:

http://www.perlegen.com/science/scanning.html

At Perlegen, we have developed a set of over 1.5 million SNPs that we use in genetic association studies to provide a powerful approach for identifying combinations of common trait-associated variants. This resource was generated using high-density oligonucleotide array technology to sequence dozens of ethnically-diverse human genomes. By comparing the sequences of these individual genomes, we were able to identify over 1.5 million widely distributed SNPs.

Approximately 1.1 million of these SNPs were found to be common in the ethnically-diverse population (i.e. present in at least 10% of the individuals of the population), making them extremely useful for identifying the genetic causes of complex diseases, including those that affect different ethnic groups. Across our entire set of 1.5 million SNPs, the average spacing is one SNP per two kilobases (kb), making for a very high-density SNP marker set.

We also have shown that there is strong linkage disequilibrium between neighboring SNPs in the Perlegen SNP panel i.e., the SNPs are often associated with each other. We identified ~ 175,000 regions (called haplotype blocks) within which SNPs were in strong linkage disequilibrium. In addition to the close association between neighboring SNPs, we found that for each haplotype block, the SNPs within the block fell into one of only a few possible combinations (called haplotype patterns).

This combination of high density common SNP markers, strong linkage disequilibrium exhibited between neighboring SNPs, and the limited number of haplotype patterns allows us to use the Perlegen SNP set to perform statistically powerful association studies. We can identify genes contributing even a small amount to complex traits, such as susceptibility to common diseases and drug responses.