Illumina Announces Low Cost Personal Sequencing System for Next-Generation Sequencing to Individual Researchers

The MiSeq™ from Illumina is a low-cost personal sequencing system that provides individual researchers a platform with rapid turnaround time, accuracy, and radically improved ease of use. The system's workflow offers the flexibility to go from purified DNA to analyzed data in as few as eight hours, or to generate in excess of 1 gigabase per run in slightly over a day. Expected to be priced under $125,000 with individual run prices ranging from $400-$750, MiSeq will be an affordable next-generation sequencing (NGS) platform.

"MiSeq takes advantage of recent advances in our sequencing chemistry, including significantly faster cycle times and simplified sample preparation, to deliver next-generation sequencing to individual researchers, especially those who currently use capillary electrophoresis (CE) sequencers," said Jay Flatley, President and CEO of Illumina. "Users will also benefit greatly from MiSeq's compact footprint of approximately 2 feet square, intuitive user interface, simple workflow, and low capital and run price. The platform will enable applications such as amplicon sequencing, clone checking, small genome sequencing, ChIP-Seq, and RNA-Seq, all with a single, integrated instrument and at a fraction of current costs and time."

Using Illumina's proven TruSeq chemistry, MiSeq provides users the flexibility to optimize run conditions to suit their particular applications. Like all other Illumina sequencing platforms, MiSeq performs both single and paired-end runs with read lengths of up to 2 x 150 base pairs. The ability to support paired-end reads is critical for a broad range of applications including amplicon sequencing, sequencing of complex genome regions, and efficient mapping. The platform also leverages a new proprietary protocol for efficient and cost-effective targeting of 10s to 100s of amplicons, allowing CE users to complete their projects in a fraction of the time at significant cost savings. To accommodate space limitations often encountered in smaller laboratories, cluster amplification has been integrated with the 2 feet square platform. This eliminates the need for additional instruments, which are often necessary to operate other NGS platforms, especially those that rely on emulsion PCR (ePCR) for sample amplification.