Next Generation Sequencing

In a press release yesterday, Helicos Biosciences announced that they have shipped their first instrument to the company Expression Analysis in North Carolina. Interesting features of the instrument are off course the high throughput (acclaimed 1.3 billion bases per hour in the near future) and the fact that Helicos claim that they are dedicated to bringing the price of the chemistry down to 1000$ per human genome. However, equally interesting is the absence of an amplification step in the sample preparation which could significantly ease the use of the instrument.