Main new technologies from AGBT15

Ion Torrent

• The new avalanche chemistry.

This new chemistry based on isothermal amplification will provide longer reads up to 600bp on PGM an 400bp on Proton PI with lower costs for template preparation. 

• New protocols for Ampliseq library preparation on Ion Chef system. 

The company aims to transfer all the processing steps on the new Ion Chef that will beacm the all-in-one solution from library prep to chip loading, minimizing hand on time. Take a look to the video on you tube.

• News on the PII chip.

They finally reported about a full working version of the PII chip producing up to 300M reads with 100bp length. However an official release date was not announced

Illumina

• NeoPrep, the new automated system for library preparation. 

Having already presented some new sequencers few months ago, Illumina come to the stage with this new equipment that will provide fast and accurate library preparation and can prepare 16 libraries at with as little as 30 minutes of hands-on time. NeoPrep is based on the electrowetting microfluidic technology and use A cartridge with reagents and your sheared DNA. The instrument generate and quantify each library, ready for pooling. Roughly is required per run. All this stuff at the price of $49K ($39K introductory pricing for the first 6 months). More details at the Illumina page or on Omics Omics blog.

10X Genomics

10X Genomics is the real innovation this year. They revealed their new GemCode technology to reconstruct long reads and haplotypes from standard short reads sequencing. The new instrument will integrate in the standard Illumina based library preparation, thus configuring as an add-on for already equipped laboratories. Using dedicated pen source software and genome browsers from 10X Genomics one can then generate standard file formats (such as phased VCF or BAM with phase tags) and visualize the reconstructed haplotypes. 

Take a look at this nice video or read more details from Omics Omics.