<figcaption> Credit: Melinda / wikimedia.org</figcaption>
Credit: Melinda / wikimedia.org

User:

Jose Royo, Andalusian Center for Development Biology, Spain

Project:

Determining the role of genetic variations in the development of human diseases and using this information to develop better drug targets

Problem:

Royo's group, then at Spanish biotech start-up Neocodex, had no SNP genotyping platform, so sequencing was affordable on the low scale, and he generally ran 5-15 SNPs in 1,000-2,000 samples. However, when medium-throughput projects arose, Royo's group faced the problem of genotyping 50-200 SNPs in 500 samples. "The investment in labeled oligos increased significantly the cost per sample," Royo writes in an E-mail, because they were faced with designing a different labeled primer for each SNP, the label being the most costly.

Solution:

Royo's group developed a "universal" labeled primer whose complementary sequence was incorporated as...

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