Life finds a way
January 29th, 2010
Earlier this week Life Technologies announced the next revision of their SOLiD platform, SOLiD 4. I don’t have all the details that I had for the Illumina HiSeq 2000, but here is what I do know: the system will produced 100 Gb of alignable sequence data on two slides per 14 day run. The sequence data will be paired-end, 50×35 base reads. Reagent costs for each run will be about $6,000. Since you need about 100 Gb of sequence to sequence a human genome, you’re looking at about $6000 in reagent costs per human genome. They also indicated that capacity for the instrument will increase to 300 Gb per run and the cost for reagents per human genome will be less than $3000 by the end of 2010. In comparison, the Illumina HiSeq 2000 reagent costs will be about $10,000 per human genome at its release with, by my calculations, a path to about $4000 per human genome (I have no idea what the time frame might be to reach the end of that path, but given this announcement by Life, it will likely be aggressive). You have to love the way competition drives down costs. Similar to Illumina’s announcement of a big HiSeq 2000 purchase at its announcement, Life announced that Ignite Institute would acquire 100 SOLiD 4 instruments as part of partnership with Life. Life also announced a major bioinformatics investment program as well as a physician education program through their Foundation.
Update: According to the press release, Ignite is “acquiring”, not purchasing, the instruments in “partnership” with Life. So it appears this is not an outright purchase of a large number of instruments. I have updated the text in the post to be more accurate.
Posted in genomics | 6 Comments »
Tagged with: genomics, Illumina, SOLiD
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January 30th, 2010 at 9:36 am
Hi David,
I haven’t seen the Ignite release just the Genomeweb story. Did it say purchase or acquire ?
February 1st, 2010 at 1:35 pm
H. Hare, the Life press release (linked above) says “acquire” in a “partnership” with Life. So it appears there is some wheeling and dealing going on. I have updated the text to be more accurate.
February 11th, 2010 at 11:38 pm
I still think read length matters. 50/35bp is way too short.
February 12th, 2010 at 12:25 am
MB, you sound like an advertisement for 454.
February 24th, 2010 at 10:49 am
It is confirmed that Ignite is purchasing all 100 units. None of these are planned consignments.
March 3rd, 2010 at 8:44 am
I believe the BGI deal with ILMN also has similar language with revenues expected over 3 years. Either way you cut it this is great for the industry.
Info I have is 50×35 on paired ends but 50×50 on mate pairs with 75mers coming later in the year.
In terms of Readlength…
Have a look at the 2 Sanger cancer papers (not the same sample..large caveat). Compares genomes with 25×25 on SOLiD V2 vs 75×75 on GAIIx. Similar power to detect variation (appears to have more structure in the SOLiD data with the insert sizes). I think discussions about readlength not anchored in accuracy are smoke and mirror games.
Complete genomics gets alot done with 70 discontiguous 10mers.
Smith et al first demonstrated the lower FP rate in SOLiD data.
Harismendy confirmed this but showed more FNs which from my read is due to comparing Circularized libraries to Fragment libraries.
Walter et al confirms lower FPs with SOLiD in BMC genomics
Clark et al show more power to detect at deprecated coverages with SOLiD than ILMN in U87 PLoS Genetics (caveat..genomic SOLiD to higher coverage array enriched ILMN)
Skryabin et al also has an interesting comparison sequencing the “Russian man” although this looks dated in terms of tech revs.
Likewise Leary et al get alot done with 25×25 in terms of translocation detection with V2 SOLiD
My 2 cents is that everyones opinion on what readlength is needed is influenced by the 75mers they can get (high error) and hence they cant fathom going to 50mers with the same error as mismappings worry them but when they are highly accurate 50mers (8-10X more accurate) alot appears to be getting done.