TRADE NEWS: Agilent Technologies Provides Oligo Libraries for Hannon Lab to Develop New Generation of Gene-Silencing Libraries

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) today announced an agreement to provide the Hannon laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) with oligonucleotide libraries to further develop the widely used small hairpin RNA interference (shRNA) libraries.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators Gregory Hannon, Ph.D., at CSHL, and Stephen Elledge, Ph.D., the Gregor Mendel professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, pioneered the generation of plasmid-based shRNA libraries. These libraries contain constructs against all identified genes in the human and mouse genomes with the unique ability to silence targeted genes very specifically and effectively over long time periods. The earlier collaborative work was published in Nature Methods 1, 241-248 (2004) and Nature Genetics 37, 1281-1288 (2005).

“Agilent has significantly improved its programmable in-situoligonucleotide synthesis technology since the original publication, and we’ve developed the capability to synthesize as many as 55,000 oligonucleotides per library, and also make them as long as 200 bases,” said Emily LeProust, Ph.D., R&D chemistry manager, Genomics for Agilent. “This means that we can provide Dr. Hannon with high quality starting material in a massively parallel fashion and at a cost significantly lower than current oligonucleotide synthesis technology.”

“The 100 base-pair barrier has been broken, and researchers no longer need to combine individually synthesized oligos from microplates into a single tube,” she added.

Agilent says that it is producing at a very low error rate (one out of 250 bases or better), and is delivering quantities from 0.2 fmol to tens of fmols per oligo. The flexible synthesis platform permits rapid prototyping of an oligo mixture prior to scale-up for larger studies. The ability to synthesize long oligos of high quality enables novel approaches to the study of biological problems and systems. Agilent oligo libraries are available to selected users under an early access program.

Agilent is a leading worldwide provider of microarray-based genomics solutions. It provides research tools that enable scientists to study a wide range of applications including gene expression, alternative splicing, chromosomal aberrations and gene copy number (aCGH), protein/DNA interactions (ChIP on Chip) and DNA methylation. For further details about Agilent’s microarray solutions, visit www.opengenomics.com.

About Agilent Technologies

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) is the world’s premier measurement company and a technology leader in communications, electronics, life sciences and chemical analysis. The company’s 19,000 employees serve customers in more than 110 countries. Agilent had net revenue of $5.4 billion in fiscal year 2007. Information about Agilent is available on the Web at www.agilent.com.

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