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Tuesday, 6 October 2015

X Ten: now available for non-Human

Finally. Today Illumina announced that X Ten users can perform whole-genome sequencing of non-human species. Does this mean exomes and RNA-seq are on their way to X Ten? Or that an X One is going to be announced at JP Morgan? I might just hold off on buying that shiny new HiSeq 4000 until this is a bit clearer.

 
For small to medium labs the X Ten and even X Five were the stuff of dreams and nightmares. Dreams of what would be possible with this technology; nightmares of what might happen to smaller labs.

The dreams turned out to be true and the nightmares have pretty much gone away. But the rapid developments from Illumina continue to be difficult to keep up with. I only wrote about the performance of HiSeq 2500 V4 chemistry a little over a year ago, and it looks like we'll ditch it in favour of HiSeq 4000 in 2016.

The link on Illumina's webpage does not appear to be live just yet but I'm sure we'll hear more in the next couple of days.

PS: If your Wheat, Horse, Whale, etc, etc, etc genome sequencing grant just got approved you can look forward to a nice slush fund. Time to buy that Apple watch maybe?
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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous8 October 2015 at 15:56

    Hey James,

    what is your opinion about the HiSeq 4000? I talked to some poeple and heard that you'll have problemes when you load the flowcells with fragments which differ in length. Sequencing of PCR fragments might be problematic. Do you have a list of pros and cons for the HiSeq4000
    Best
    Mathias

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous13 October 2015 at 01:53

    The X Ten is basically the same instrument as the HS4000. Just pick the X Ten and pay only a third of the reagent costs (... cough ...).

    The differences that Illumina claims to see between large population scale projects and conventional sequencing do not exist. The division is artificial and thus will not be sustained in the long run. Until then Illumina will play games with its honest customers.
    The drastically differing reagent prices between these systems might just look like the manipulations of a monopolist? Nobody is writing that, though.

    ReplyDelete
  3. creative biomart13 October 2015 at 10:06

    Thanks for the news. I'll contact if I have need.
    -Caroline
    http://www.creativebiomart.net/

    ReplyDelete

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