Agilent Nucleic Acid Manufacturing Overview
Agilent Technologies has been a technological leader in the synthesis of oligonucleotide for 10 years. This long history of building nucleic acids back to our origin as a spin-off from Hewlett-Packard. Our DNA oligonucleotide synthesis technology is based on the same concepts that enable ink-jet printing.
Agilent brought this concept to the field of Genomics and has become the world’s most advanced and reliable manufacturer of nucleic acids.
We use a proprietary, noncontact industrial inkjet printing process. Starting from a digital sequence file, we print oligonucleotide probes, base-by-base up to 230 bases in length. This precise inkjet process enables the delivery of extremely small, accurate volumes of the chemicals to be spotted.
While initially this process was used to manufacture our SurePrint microarrays, we have expanded this technology to other products. We also use this process to manufacture our long oligonucleotide libraries used for hybrid capture-based target enrichment with our SureSelect products.
The flexibility and stability of this process supports the manufacturing of catalog and custom designs for any application or experimental approach.
Agilent’s SurePrint technology provides a flexible and customizable platform for manufacturing DNA microarrays and oligonucleotide libraries. We manufacture DNA by printing DNA synthetic chemistry, building up oligonucleotides base-by-base. Because our manufacturing system is driven by information, we can easily customize both designs and production quantities. And thanks to over 20 years of experience with printing DNA synthetic chemistry, we can manufacture high-quality oligos of many different lengths.
We control the quality of our products in three ways. First, we work with our suppliers to assure that our starting materials are consistently of the highest quality. Second, our production equipment automatically performs multiple quality tests at each step of production. Product that fails an in-process quality test is scrapped and immediately rescheduled for production. In this way, we can assure that our customers receive their custom products as soon as possible. Finally, we perform multiple endpoint QC tests to make sure that our processes all functioned properly and that our products meet all specifications.
We provide a friendly on-line interface allowing to easily design new arrays starting from our database of predesigned probes, from customer sequence files (from your NGS experiments) or simply by uploading probes. Our online interface can be considered as a virtual spotter, that gives customers full control on microarray content. Creating a custom array requires only few steps thanks to predefined design wizards or, if needed, our field application scientist are available to support. Custom arrays undergo same stringent quality controls as catalog arrays and can be ready in your lab in as low as 4-5 weeks.
We do not require any minimum order volume or additional cost to produce custom arrays. This approach enables to scale up projects from 1 to thousands of slides, without any compromise on probe quality.
Since the launch of our first exome kit, Agilent has been serving the target enrichment market for 10 years. We are known as the best in the industry for NGS customization and long history in manufacturing high quality long oligo probes, which is the foundation of our target enrichment technology.
With our free-to the public SureDesign tool, you can create your customer NGS panels in a few clicks following the wizard-guided design workflows. You can either extract optimized probes for your genes of interest from our catalog exome designs or design your own probes with user-intuitive parameters, essentially for sequences of any organisms. Need help with your design, our highly skilled application scientist teams are here to assist you. Rest assured that your custom panels are manufactured with the same high fidelity oligo synthesis technology and rigorous QC as our catalog panels.
We strive to excel in both quality and speed. Your custom NGS kits can now be ready to ship in 2-3 weeks from the time the order is placed. Our custom kit sizes start from 16 reactions. Small pilot experiment or production scale project, with automation options, Agilent’s custom NGS is the solution for you.
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