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dgmacarthur | June 3, 2010Jay Flatley, CEO of sequencing giant Illumina, announced at the Consumer Genetics Conference today that the company had reduced the price of its retail whole-genome sequencing service. At $19,500 this still isn't in the realm of an impulse buy for most of us, but it's a long way down from the $48,000 that Illumina offered at the launch of its service, and more than an order of magnitude below the $350,000 price paid for the first ever retail genome.
Illumina's press release notes that bulk orders of 5 or more genomes drop the price to $14,500 per genome, and "[i]ndividuals with serious…
dgmacarthur | March 11, 2010
Zoe McDougall from Oxford Nanopore points me to a press release from Illumina announcing a new era of celebrity genomics:
Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) today announced that it has sequenced the DNA of American actress Glenn Close, the first publicly named female to have her DNA sequenced to full coverage. The service was completed in Illumina's CLIA certified and CAP accredited laboratory utilizing Illumina's Genome Analyzer technology and following the established process shown at http://www.everygenome.com/. Ms. Close's DNA was sequenced to an average depth greater than 30 fold, providing…
dgmacarthur | February 28, 2010The main theme of this year's Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting should come as no surprise to regular readers: sequencing. Generating as many bases of DNA sequence as quickly, cheaply and accurately as possible is the goal of the moment, and the number of companies jostling to achieve that goal is growing rapidly.
The meeting saw impressive performances from established players in the field, especially Illumina: their new HiSeq 2000 instrument seems to have dug in as the platform of choice for generating vast amounts of high-quality short-read data. Life Technologies seem to…
dgmacarthur | February 26, 2010I've been remiss in blogging from the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting here in Marco Island, Florida, primarily due to some panic-stricken last-minute changes to the slides for my own presentation last night.
Fortunately the conference has been extremely well-covered by others: Sanger colleague Luke Jostins has blog posts up summarising day 1 and day 2 of the meeting; Dan Koboldt from MassGenomics has his first impressions and a review of the cancer genomics session; and Anthony Fejes is continuing the tradition of publishing extensive notes on every talk he attends.
There…
dgmacarthur | January 12, 2010The big news from the JP Morgan investment conference today is the announcement of a brand new shiny sequencing machine from Illumina, the HiSeq 2000. The new machine boasts an impressive set of statistics, and looks likely to gradually replace Illumina's GAIIx as the workhorse of most modern sequencing facilities.
So, how excited should we be?
Let's be clear about this up front: this new machine, while impressive, represents an incremental advance rather than a dramatic technological leap forward. This is still second-generation sequencing, generating relatively small snippets of DNA…
dgmacarthur | August 31, 2009Sequencing giant Illumina has announced that it has delivered its first commercial personal genome sequence. The sequence was generated by the genome sequencing service launched by Illumina back in June, and was delivered in collaboration with new personal genomics company Pathway Genomics.
Illumina's genome sequencing service costs $48,000, and its first customer was entrepreneur Hermann Hauser. Bio-IT World summarises details of the sequencing itself:
Illumina completed the sequence at its CLIA-certified laboratory, producing more than 110 billion base calls, good for 30X coverage of the…
dgmacarthur | August 12, 2009I've just discovered a very promising new blog in the genomics sphere (well, technically it's a newly relaunched blog) run by a group at the University of Birmingham.
Two posts by Nick Loman are of immediate interest to readers here. Firstly, I highly recommend Nick's thorough dissection of accusations made by Applied Biosystems' Kevin McKernan in a recent submission to a UK House of Lords enquiry, which include the claim that the Sanger Institute's adoption of technology from AB competitor Illumina were driven by bias. Here's a key paragraph, but if you're interested in the competition in…
dgmacarthur | June 11, 2009The buzz leading up to this week's Consumer Genetics Show in Boston suggested that a major announcement would be made by the CEO of genomics technology provider Illumina, Jay Flatley. Illumina provides the most popular second-generation sequencing instrument currently on the market, the Genome Analyzer II, and has been making noises about moving into the personal genomics industry since at least the beginning of the year, so the announcement itself was not exactly a shock: Illumina is launching a personal genome sequencing service.
The launch comes with a new website, the appealingly titled…
dgmacarthur | May 20, 2009BioArray News (subscription required) reports that genomic analysis technology provider Illumina has launched a new family of genotyping chips designed to simultaneously assay 4 million sites of variation in the human genome.
The chips are a major step up from the 1-million-feature chips that
currently represent the state of the art, and take advantage of several
public projects generating catalogues of human genetic variation (such
as the 1000 Genomes Project).
Illumina has also increased the density of markers in and around genes,
and fleshed out regions that have previously been…
dgmacarthur | February 5, 2009Regular readers will know that I'm at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting this week, one of the most highly-awaited meetings on the genomics calendar.
There's a huge amount of fascinating data being presented (anyone interested in a blow-by-blow account should follow Anthony Fejes' live-blogging), but there's definitely an overarching theme: the evolving battle between the new-technology sequencing companies. This is a competition that most researchers in genomics are watching with great interest, because it promises to bring about very rapid advances in the speed,…
dgmacarthur | January 14, 2009Still quite a way, based on this survey of second-generation sequencing users (subscription only, I think) conducted by the industry publication In Sequence.
Along with a range of other questions, the survey asked users about the cost to generate one billion base pairs (one gigabase, or Gb) on their platform at the end of 2008, which is about as current as we're likely to get. I've estimated below the total cost to sequence a complete* human genome, assuming an overall depth of coverage** of 30x, for the three most widely-used second-generation platforms:
The fine print
Note that the number…
sporte | April 22, 2008One of my favorite web 2.0 technologies is the webinar. When you work at a company and not a University, with constant seminars, it gets a bit harder to hop on a bus and travel across town to learn about new things. Webinars are a good way to fill that gap. I grab my coffee cup, put on my headphones, and I get to listen to someone tell me about their work for an hour and show slides over the web. It's nice.
Our company is even going to be involved in two webinars in the next two months. One of us is giving an Illumina webinar tomorrow on managing Next Generation Sequencing data. A…
sporte | March 13, 2008It's a Solexa data directory.
I've held off on blogging about Next Generation Sequencing here, but now that one of my colleagues has started blogging about it, it seems like a good time to write a little about FinchTalk, our company blog.
We've decided that we can serve an educational role for people who are interested in Next Generation DNA Sequencing.
Certainly, FinchTalk is our company blog and it is a place where you can expect to read about our products. But, we've noticed that quite often, the sexy technologies and fancy graphs get the press and the practical aspects - how do…