Illumina, Inc, has announced that the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) Inflammatory Bowel Disease Genetics Consortium will utilize Illumina's Sentrix® HumanHap300 BeadChips and Infiniumâ„¢ assay reagents to genotype more than 2000 case-control samples for a genome-wide study designed to help identify genetic variants that increase susceptibility to Crohn's disease. As a comparator, 1000 control individuals will undergo genotyping, which also will be made available to the scientific community.  

Principal Investigator of the Data Coordinating Center, Judy Cho, MD, associate professor of medicine in the section of gastroenterology at the University of Chicago Hospitals, is leading the study. Dr. Cho and colleagues have assembled a well-characterized collection of disease samples and will perform the data analysis.

The genotyping will be performed at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York (part of the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System), under the direction of Peter K. Gregersen, MD, head of the Feinstein Institute's Robert S. Boas Center for Genomics and Human Genetics.  

The sample genotyping will be conducted on an automated Illumina BeadStation using the Sentrix HumanHap300 BeadChip, which can query over 317,000 tagSNPs on a single microarray device and which has call rates exceeding 99%, and reproducibility and Mendelian accuracy both greater than 99.9%.

Illumina, Inc, of San Diego, California, is a provider of tools for the large-scale analysis of genetic variation and function.

―A. Techman