454 Life Sciences has launched the GS FLX Titanium series reagents and software.
454, a Roche company, said the reagent kits provide individual sequencing reads with an improved Q20 length of 400 base pairs (99 per cent accuracy at the 400th base and higher for preceding bases) and a five-fold increase in throughput to 400-600 million base pairs per instrument run.
The GS FLX Titanium series kits have been installed by Baylor College of Medicine, Washington University, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the Joint Genome Institute.
Dr Chad Nusbaum, co-director of the Genome Biology Programme at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said: 'This system will enable us to expand our scientific reach and tackle projects that were previously too expensive to be practical.
'We are in the process of developing methods to leverage the power of the 400 base-pair sequencing reads, in particular for de novo assembly approaches for large genomes.' Dr Stephen Richards, assistant professor at the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine, added: 'We achieved N50 contig sizes of 30-50 kilobases with 12-fold sequence coverage of the genomes and a N50 scaffold size in excess of 3Mb when adding the 3K and 20K paired end reads of 454 Life Sciences.'
