Solexa Announces Technical Milestones at The AGBT Conference

Solexa, Inc. (Nasdaq: SLXA) today announced a number of significant technical advances that highlight the potential of the Solexa Genome Analysis System to transform DNA sequencing and expression profiling.

The presented data provides evidence of the Company’s progress in successfully extending the capabilities of its system to handle a broad range of sequencing applications.

Speaking at the 2006 Advances in Genome Biology and Technology Conference (AGBT), Dr. David Bentley, chief scientist of Solexa, presented data on the Company’s progress in achieving higher raw read accuracy, longer read lengths and paired reads. He further discussed data that demonstrates the feasibility of using the Solexa Genome Analysis System for resequencing of entire genomes, of candidate and linkage regions and of genes, as well as provided preliminary results from Solexa’s Genome Initiative, the Company’s stated goal to resequence a human genome in 2006.

“The data presented today speaks to the enormous technical progress we have made in recent months, and indicates that we could access a wider segment of the sequencing market and accelerate the adoption rate of the system,” stated John West, chief executive officer of Solexa. ”We expect these impressive achievements to enhance the ability of scientists to rapidly and economically resequence genomes using the Solexa Genome Analysis system, and to extend the system’s capabilities to perform true de novo sequencing and other specialized sequencing applications.”

Among the technical achievements reported by Solexa are:

• High quality reads currently up to 50 base pairs (bps) using typical human templates;
• Reduced error rates averaging less than 1% over 25bp reads with typical observation of up to 65% perfect reads out to 35bps;
• Demonstration of paired read capability, providing proof of principle that the Solexa Genome Analysis system can be extended to perform true de novo sequencing applications;
• Development of protocols and pilot experimental data for resequencing entire genomes, candidate and linkage regions and genes;
• Further validation of earlier reported results, indicating that data generated by the Solexa Genome Analysis System appears to be free from significant sequence- or structure-specific anomalies;
• Consistent coverage distribution approaching Poisson for human genomic templates; and
• Solexa Genome Initiative pilot experiments, which demonstrate that sequences generated to date are evenly distributed across all human chromosomes as expected from a random and unbiased “shotgun” fragment generation method.

The Company also announced its commitment to release data generated from a variety of projects, including Solexa’s Genome Initiative, at regular intervals. The data, which will include sequence traces as well as aligned reads, will be made available through an intuitive, easy-to-use browser developed in collaboration with Ensembl.