Next Generation Sequencing

Bio-IT World’s Editor-in-Chief, Kevin Davies, elaborates on the current status of the major vendors of Next Generation Sequencing machines, and crowns Illumina as the current king of NGS:

(…) The publication of not one but three complete human genomes in the same issue of Nature last November effectively marks the end of the latest chapter in the sequencing saga. These included the first African genome, led by David Bentley and colleagues at Illumina UK; the first Asian genome, produced by Jun Wang and colleagues at the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) in Shenzen, China; and the first cancer genome, that of a deceased leukemia patient, produced by Elaine Mardis, Rick Wilson, and colleagues at the Washington University School of Medicine Genome Center in St Louis. The common thread in those publications was the platform—Illumina’s Genome Analyzer (GA).

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According to a recent press release, Illumina expects to increase their Genome Analyzer sequencing throughput per run by about 6 times in 2009 - following a 15 fold increase in 2008 this gives them a whopping 90 fold increase in just two years.

Costs are decreasing as throughput is increasing, and a 25x coverage of a human genome is expected to cost only 10,000 USD at the end of 2009, according to Illumina.