Steven Jones (British Columbia Cancer Agency Genome Sciences Centre): We developed a method, ChIP-sequencing (ChIP-seq), combining chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) and massively parallel sequencing to identify mammalian DNA sequences bound by transcription factors in vivo. We used ChIP-seq to map STAT1 targets in interferon-bold gamma (IFN-bold gamma)–stimulated and unstimulated human HeLa S3 cells, and compared the method's performance to ChIP-PCR and to ChIP-chip for four chromosomes. By ChIP-seq, using 15.1 and 12.9 million uniquely mapped sequence reads, and an estimated false discovery rate of less than 0.001, we identified 41,582 and 11,004 putative STAT1-binding regions in stimulated and unstimulated cells, respectively. Of the 34 loci known to contain STAT1 interferon-responsive binding sites, ChIP-seq found 24 (71%). ChIP-seq targets were enriched in sequences similar to known STAT1 binding motifs. Comparisons with two ChIP-PCR data sets suggested that ChIP-seq sensitivity was between 70% and 92% and specificity was at least 95%.

Curtis Tassel (USDA): We describe an economical, efficient, single-step method for SNP discovery, validation and characterization that uses deep sequencing of reduced representation libraries (RRLs) from specified target populations. Using nearly 50 million sequences generated on an Illumina Genome Analyzer from DNA of 66 cattle representing three populations, we identified 62,042 putative SNPs and predicted their allele frequencies. Genotype data for these 66 individuals validated 92% of 23,357 selected genome-wide SNPs, with a genotypic and sequence allele frequency correlation of r = 0.67. Methods: requiring an average base quality score of at least 25 across the entire tag for all reads; required a minimum nucleotide quality score of 27 at the SNP position; required that for each tag pair, one of the two alternate tag allele sequences uniquely map to Btau3.1; required that the tag sequence containing the alternate allele have no exact match to Btau3.1; discarded tags that contained more than one SNP; required a minimum threshold of two copies of each allele to call a SNP;

Hagan Bayley (University of Oxford): Introduced new massively parallel technologies for sequencing.