The arrays add to Illumina's Infinium whole-genome genotyping product line and boasts impressive history, having been based on the HumanHap300 Genotyping BeadChip, launched earlier this year.
The HumanHap300-Duo and the HumanHap300-Duo+ Genotyping BeadChips, contain over 634,000 total tag SNPs on a single BeadChip, with 317,000 tag SNPs per sample.
By leveraging the power of tag SNPs, which act as proxies for other SNPs, a much higher level of genomic coverage can be obtained.
Illumina claim that these new products deliver a level of genomic coverage that would require more than twice the number of randomly selected SNPs.
"These are the seventh and eighth Infinium genotyping BeadChips introduced this year. Our speed in new product introduction is due to the inherent flexibility of our technology and the power of our proprietary assays," said Carsten Rosenow, marketing manager for DNA analysis solutions at Illumina.
"Our genotyping solutions are the most comprehensive on the market, from flexible, whole-genome genotyping products to focused, custom panels and tools for LOH and DNA copy number analysis."
The HumanHap300-Duo+ allows for the addition of 60,000 custom SNP loci to the base product, enabling researchers to enrich for SNPs of interest in any genomic region.
The format of the HumanHap300-Duo products makes them an ideal tool for loss of heterozygosity (LOH) and comparative genomic hybridisation (CGH) studies. In these studies a diseased sample and a normal sample are analysed in parallel, as in cancer research.
Processing both samples on a single BeadChip streamlines workflow, saves time and provides technical and analytical convenience for researchers performing these studies.