Illumina Announces Single Flow Cell Version of HiSeq Sequencing System

The HiSeq 1000 from Illumina is a single flow cell version of the company’s HiSeq 2000 sequencing system. It is designed for researchers who want the ease of use, industry-leading cost per gigabase (Gb) and data rate of the HiSeq 2000 but do not currently require its throughput. As their research scales, users will be able to upgrade their system to the HiSeq 2000 and double their output.

“We are thrilled with the market’s enthusiasm for our HiSeq 2000 platform, which is enabling sequencing studies on an unprecedented scale. With HiSeq 1000, we’re offering researchers an additional entry point into the most powerful and cost-effective sequencing technology available,” said Jay Flatley, President and CEO of Illumina. “Powered by TruSeq reagents and leveraging the HiSeq 2000 architecture, HiSeq 1000 will provide researchers who have lower throughput requirements an ideal platform to address their current research demands. As those demands change, users can scale easily through an upgrade to handle future sequencing needs.”

HiSeq 1000 relies on the same cutting-edge, dual-surface imaging technology and breakthrough user experience as the HiSeq 2000, offering unmatched cost effectiveness and the easiest-to-use workflow of any sequencing platform. At launch, it is expected HiSeq 1000 will deliver in excess of 100 Gb of data per run using paired 100 base pair reads, easily enabling the sequencing of a complete human genome in a single run. To address the broad range of gene expression and epigenetic applications, HiSeq 1000 can deliver greater than 750 million high-quality single reads per run in as few as two days, providing rapid and cost effective transcriptional profiling, ChIP-SEQ, and methylation mapping.

The company is currently accepting orders for HiSeq 1000 and expects to begin shipping the first systems in the mid to latter part of the first quarter of 2011.