The GS Junior in the Flesh

We were very pleased to have reps from Illumina, Applied Biosystems and Roche present at the IDRN next-gen sequencing meeting at the University of Birmingham today. Tim Jones brought along a GS Junior to give us a look at this intriguing new entrant to the sequencing market and what I think is the first public viewing of the instrument. As he said, Roche are chasing a different market to AB and Illumina and they intend the 454 to be complementary to the short-read systems. The GS Junior is a cute little thing, about the size of a laser printer. The LED looks a bit like a coin-slot and a few people commented that you "put your 50p in there" and out comes the data. Looking inside the box the slot for the PicoTitrePlate is absolutely tiny, reflecting the lower throughput of this instrument (40Mb per run). A few people commented that they'd buy one if they did it in pink. Here are some pics for all you sequencer-nerds to look at.

[gallery columns="2" orderby="ID"]