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Santa Clara, CA (OBBeC) - Affymetrix has announced today that the PhyloChip, a custom Affymetrix microarray developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has won the bronze prize in the 2008 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards. The PhyloChip helps researchers identify dangerous pathogens before they can affect humans.

The custom array PhyloChip was developed to simultaneously identify and quantify up to 8,900 distinctive environmental and pathogenic microbial species in a single experiment, in less than nine hours. The PhyloChip is unprecedented in its ability to accurately test any clinical or environmental sample without the need for culturing. The chip has been used by the Department of Homeland Security for bioterror detection, the Japanese Defence Force, the U.S. Department of Energy in bioremediation of contaminated soils to detoxify the earth and the State of California Water Quality Board for monitoring contaminated beaches.

"The speed with which we can now carry out our research far outpaces serial cloning. We offer the potential for numerous applications, including human health assessment, water quality and environmental cleanup, enabling complete evaluation of numerous samples on a daily basis," said Dr Gary Andersen, project leader at Berkeley Lab. "Affymetrix has allowed us to replace expensive and time-consuming cloning and sequencing with a method that will offer a competitive advantage to anyone wanting to detect bacteria in soil, air, water or clinical samples."

In July the PhyloChip won an R&D Magazine award for technology advancement. It was recognized for its ability to quickly, comprehensively and accurately identify species within microbial samples from any environmental source, without any culturing required. The PhyloChip is not yet commercially available. For more information please contact Dr. Andersen at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.