Landed: First Illumina HiSeq Machines Advertised

In case you didn't see the announcement already, the Illumina HiSeq can produce 200 gigabases of sequence data and 2 billion reads per run. When it was launched we knew that BGI in China had signed an agreement to buy 128 of these machines but no-one has fessed up to owning one just yet. Things might have changed today. Two updates to the map of high-throughput sequencers, one hot on the heels of the other are both advertising HiSeq capability in Europe. GATC and DNAvision, both service companies have updated the map to say they have a HiSeq machine ready and waiting to service customers. Their corporate websites are a bit less clear on whether it has actually arrived yet, indicating just that the HiSeq has been ordered.

We work predominantly on bacterial genomes so this throughput is probably overkill for sequencing E. coli, but the dynamic range for applications such as RNA-Seq and CHiP-Seq is going to be absolutely unbelievable.