The Salk Institute and WaferGen Bio-systems established a nano-qPCR Core Laboratory that will utilize WaferGen’s SmartChip System for high-throughput real-time PCR studies. A major focus of the lab is to design and test libraries of assays targeting receptors and transcriptional regulators for functional pathways. The lab will be under the guidance of Ronald M. Evans, professor and March of Dimes chair in molecular and developmental biology at Salk.

“We have successfully tested WaferGen’s SmartChip system in our laboratory in a variety of gene expression experiments,” said Dr. Evans. “The platform is ideal for follow up studies to ChIP Seq, and for de novo large-scale gene expression studies in precious clinical samples. We made SmartChip System the technology of choice based on its ability to perform qPCR without pre-amplification, while providing the required throughput for measuring a series of longitudinal genomic events in cells.”

Chromatin-immunoprecipitation (ChIP) is a technique in which genomic regulatory sites bound by a specific factor of interest are enriched through antibody precipitation. ChIP sequencing utilizes NGS technology to provide the nucleotide sequences of these regulatory sites. Downstream studies have been conducted by designing qPCR assays targeting these elements and have been restricted to small numbers of analytes due to the limited amounts of ChIP material.

According to the company, WaferGen’s SmartChip technology enables NGS researchers to quantitatively evaluate the presence of numerous elements across multiple ChIP samples. This allows researchers to conduct large studies of promoter occupancy dynamics.

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