Agilent Technologies Expands Custom Microarray Offering with Industry

Agilent Technologies Expands Custom Microarray Offering with Industry's First Shared-Design Program; Benefits to Promote Collaboration Across Consortia, Academia

    Business Editors/High-Tech Writers
    Plant and Animal Genome XIII Conference

    PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 13, 2005--

New Shared Microarrays for C. Elegans, Magnaporthe Grisea Now Available
    Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) today introduced the industry's first shared microarray design program. The program presents a new way of doing business with Agilent that allows scientists to share their custom microarray designs either with designated groups while maintaining control of their intellectual property, or with the scientific community at large. Agilent prints the microarrays and makes them available on demand, ensuring quality production and distribution.
    The program is expected to particularly benefit scientists in consortia working collaboratively on the study of specific organisms. The first two organisms to be made available through this program are Caenorhabditis elegans, a worm that is a popular model organism for research, and Magnaporthe grisea, a fungus that causes rice blast disease.
    "This program gives the Toxicogenomics Research Consortium, as well as the rest of the scientific community, access to commercial-quality microarrays designed with our latest sequence information and updated as frequently as we desire," said Pat Hurban, director of Investigational Genomics at Icoria Inc. "Those are huge benefits that help promote collaboration across industry and academia. We designed the array to mesh seamlessly with Wormbase (a resource for nematode biology and genomics) so that users of the Agilent-produced C. elegans microarray can effectively contribute to the progress of collaborative research efforts."

    The Shared Microarray Design Program

    Agilent's shared microarray design program provides an intellectual forum for researchers to work together using microarrays designed to their specifications and research use. Researchers can also share their designs with the entire global community.

    The program's key benefits to researchers include:

--	The flexibility of design without the burdens of production. Microarray manufacturing and quality assurance is handled by Agilent, guaranteeing a high-quality, commercial microarray.
--	The ability to share non-verified sequences that are still undergoing pre-publication research, while maintaining control of their intellectual property.
--	The ability for designated scientists to order each microarray on demand as easily as any Agilent catalog microarray, since each one is assigned an order number.
--	The ability to limit distribution to a predefined group of researchers or to allow distribution to the scientific community at large. Microarrays are printed on demand, so there is no minimum order required.
--	High sensitivity. Each microarray has the sensitivity of Agilent's 60-mer oligonucleotide printing technology.
--	Full integration with Agilent's end-to-end gene expression solution.

    More information about Agilent's shared microarray design program will be made available at the Agilent workshop on custom microarrays, Jan. 17 at 4:40 p.m. at the Plant and Animal Genome XIII Conference, being held at the Town and Country Convention Center in San Diego, Calif.

    Agilent C. Elegans Microarray

    Caenorhabditis elegans is a small nematode used in the study of genetics, developmental biology, reproduction and aging. It is a popular model organism; although it has many similarities to human biology, its life span is only two to three weeks. Three-quarters of all human diseases are known to have a counterpart in C. elegans.
    The C. elegans microarray (G2518 Option 2) contains 60-mer oligonucleotide probes for more than 21,000 genes and transcripts from the August 2004 version WS129 of Wormbase (www.wormbase.org), making it the most up-to-date C. elegans microarray available. The content of the microarray and its performance was empirically validated by Icoria Inc., a member of the Toxicogenomics Research Consortium, under contract from the National Center for Toxicogenomics at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

    Agilent Magnaporthe Grisea Microarray

    Magnaporthe grisea is a filamentous fungus that causes rice blast disease, resulting in the loss of enough rice to feed 60 million people each year. Strains of this disease also attack wheat, barley and turf grasses. Besides causing significant economic damage, rice blast is a highly characterized organism that serves as a model for scientists studying filamentous fungi that cause other cereal and crop diseases.
    The Magnaporthe grisea microarray (G4137B) contains 60-mer oligonucleotide probes for more than 15,000 genes and transcripts from Magnaporthe grisea, as well as more than 6,000 pathogenesis-regulated rice genes as defined by the International Rice Blast Genomics Consortia (IRBGC). The content of the microarray and its performance was empirically validated by Professor Ralph Dean of North Carolina State University, a principal investigator of the IRBGC.

    About Agilent in Gene Expression

    Agilent Technologies is a leading provider of complete microarray-based research solutions with more than 500 customers worldwide. With its proprietary inkjet-based manufacturing technique, Agilent provides highly sensitive 60-mer oligo microarrays in custom and catalog formats. Agilent provides a 48-slide high-throughput microarray scanner, the Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer with RNA LabChip kits for sample quality analysis, feature extraction software, Silicon Genetics software products, Rosetta gene expression data analysis systems, and a range of reagents. Product information is available online at www.agilent.com/chem/dna.

    About Agilent Technologies

    Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) is a global technology leader in communications, electronics, life sciences and chemical analysis. The company's 28,000 employees serve customers in more than 110 countries. Agilent had net revenue of $7.2 billion in fiscal year 2004. Information about Agilent is available on the Web at www.agilent.com.

    NOTE TO EDITORS: Further technology, corporate citizenship and executive news is available on the Agilent news site at www.agilent.com/go/news.

--30--JR/sf*

CONTACT: Agilent Technologies Inc. Christina Maehr, 408-553-7205 christina_maehr@agilent.com

KEYWORD: CALIFORNIA INDUSTRY KEYWORD: MEDICAL PHARMACEUTICAL MEDICAL DEVICES BIOTECHNOLOGY SOFTWARE TRADESHOW PRODUCT SOURCE: Agilent Technologies Inc.

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