Jan Schouten

P28 Jan P. Schouten has performed research on nucleic-acid protein interactions for his PhD thesis at the University of Amsterdam. He started the MRC-Holland Company in 1985 and developed several new techniques for nucleic acid analysis while being director of this company. At this moment MRC-Holland has 10 employees and is fully owned by Dr. Schouten. Multiplex Ligation-dependent Probe Amplification (MLPA) is a new method developed at MRC-Holland to establish the copy number of up to 45 nucleic acid sequences in one single reaction. It can be applied on genomic DNA (both copy number detection and methylation quantification) as well as for mRNA profiling. At this moment MLPA is used in > 200 laboratories for the detection of amplifications and deletions in a variety of genes. At this moment MLPA kits for more than 30 applications are available. In collaboration with many different laboratories, MLPA kits for another 30 applications are in preparation. Among these are MLPA kits for methylation quantification of promoter regions of tumour suppressor genes and kits for genomic profiling of specific types of tumours.