CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--This week at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology Conference (AGBT) in Marco Island, Florida, Helicos BioSciences announced that it has developed novel nucleotide-polymerase formulations that enable the characterization of homopolymers. This invention demonstrates Helicos’ ability to sequence through homopolymer regions one base at a time using its single-molecule platform. The ability to generate accurate sequences across the complete genome is critical to the identification and understanding of genetic variants associated with disease. Reading through homopolymers is important because it is estimated that a large fraction of the human genome is represented by stretches of nucleotide repeats referred to as homopolymeric regions.
