NimbleGen partners with leading researchers

Madison, Wis. - NimbleGen Systems, Inc., a producer of high-density microarrays, is allowing researchers to work with its advanced technology used for studying DNA interactions inside the cell.

The company has announced a number of limited-access partnerships, opening the door for organizations like Yale University, the University of California-Davis, and UC-San Diego to work with NimbleGen's chromatin immunoprecipitation (chIP) arrays, which offers increased probe density.

What can be done with the 2.1 million probes contained in each microarray? Dr. Stan Rose, president and CEO of NimbleGen, noted that the scan reduction capabilities of the technology, known as the NimbleChip HD2, can reduce costs to researchers. But the real value is in functionality.

Dr. Bing Ren, a limited access partner and head of the Laboratory for Gene Regulation at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at UC-SD, explained in a release that the large number of probes can reduce a whole-genome scan from 38 arrays to about seven.

It also promises to improve data quality in genome-wide analysis of proteins that bind to DNA. "We are excited by the prospect of increasing the amount of information obtained per hybridization by five to 10 times, while still collecting high-quality data," said Dr. Peggy Farnham, limited access partner and associate director of the UC-Davis Genome Center. Dr. Michael Snyder, director of Yale Center for Genomics and Proteomics, said he will use the arrays for mapping transcription factor binding sites, and probing human variations. He said the HD2 will "allow us to perform experiments currently unattainable."

Biological processes, such as transcription and DNA replication, depend on complex but coordinated interactions between proteins and DNA. To understand the mechanisms of such processes and learn about biological development and disease processes and evolution, researchers study how various proteins associate with their specific DNA target sequences in cells.

"From expression analysis, one can learn what kinds of genes are expressed in a given cell," Ren said, "but to find out the mechanisms responsible for these genes' specific expression pattern, one needs to study the transcription factors."

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