New Illumina Announced - BGI to become world's largest genome centre

The ritual of checking Twitter with my coffee this morning brought much excited chattering about the new Illumina sequencer, the HiSeq 2000 which was announced yesterday. I won't cover this in detail as there are already great blog posts up from Daniel McArthur, David Dooling and Genomics Lawyer. Bottom-line: $650,000 for the machine, $10,000 for the reagents, 2 x 100 base-pair paired-reads and the clincher, 200Gb of sequence data per run. And a terrible name.

Technology wise this has been done through parallelisation rather than chemistry changes. Illumina have increased the number of flow-cells in each run to 2. Each of these are now double-sided, and the readable area of the flow-cell has been increased. This is a bit like the processor market where Intel have managed to keep pace with Moore's Law by increasing the number of processor cores on each chip.

The other big news is that Beijing Genomics Institute have ordered 128 of these beasts, which on delivery will hand them the title of largest genome centre in the world by a country mile. According to the map of high-throughput sequencers, the Broad Institute currently hold this title. Although no doubt we will see a bunch of other genome centres placing orders for this new machine soon.

Update: For those with GA2s looking to upgrade, I am told that trading in your old machine will give you a paltry $150,000 off the list price of the HiSeq.