April 14, 2015
Recently I found a news from Illumina, the leading DNA sequencing technology provider about two new sequencing machines. In the article, Mark Wation from The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh, gives his insight about the state-of-art of DNA sequencing and its future tends: Welcome to the $1,000 genome: on Illumina and next-gen sequencing
<More about Mick Watson>
I extracted a small part of the article below:
The future for Illumina’s competitors
It will be really interesting to see how Life Technologies responds to Illumina’s latest developments. Their key advantage is speed, with the Ion Torrent platforms carrying out the sequencing component in hours rather than days. However, the throughput and cost-per-base do not match current Illumina platforms, never mind the new ones. To remain a viable business, Life Technologies, and its Ion Torrent platforms, must respond.
Pacific Biosciences’ SMRT technology has evolved significantly too and has become an essential tool for those wishing to close genomes, or sequence de novo new genomes. Intriguingly, Roche, a global health-care company, announced an agreement with Pacific Biosciences to develop DNA sequencing products for clinical diagnostics. This is not a space that Pacific Biosciences have been in up until now, and it is difficult to see how their RS II system can compete with Illumina and Ion Torrent in the clinic. Because of this, rumors of a new (benchtop?) PacBio machine abound on social media.
For many, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, heir apparent to the sequencing crown, remain the future. The company recently opened up an early-access program for their USB sequencer, the MinION. At the AGBT conference, David Jaffe showed the first data from this platform. These are exciting times for nanopore-based sequencing, but there remain challenges – particularly in interpreting the signal and turning it into the ‘bases + quality scores’ paradigm that many are used to. In fact, to get the best out of the platform, many think a change to the above paradigm will need to happen, and software may need to interpret the raw signal rather than the traditional 4 bases. On his blog, Yaniv Erlich commented that ‘MinION is not a sequencing platform. It is a sequencing sensor.’ (his italics) and I think this is a key differentiator of the platform. It is the only platform that detects an actual single strand of DNA (rather than incorporation events as a template strand is copied), and it still astounds me to think that we are soon to have in our hands the very first mobile device capable of sequencing DNA – surely an historic moment. With that idea in mind, it is hard not to believe that nanopore-based sequencing is the future. Of course, Oxford Nanopore have competitors, but one look at their management team, followed by a look at their IP portfolio, and it is hard to imagine anyone being better placed to deliver on the promises of nanopore-based sequencing.
image source: All Things Illumina Sequencing Methods
