Applied Biosystems has announced that its Solid system has been named the Life Science Innovation of the Year for 2008 by 'The Scientist' magazine.
The Solid system received the recognition based upon its ability to reduce the cost of DNA sequencing, which will enable basic and clinical researchers who may not have previously considered genomic approaches to re-evaluate their experimental workflow.
The technology, which was commercially launched in October 2007, delivers a combination of high throughput, accuracy, and low cost per project.
The Solid system continues to evolve, with the latest version of the platform - Solid 3 system - setting new standards with higher sample throughput.
The new system, which is to be launched in early 2009, will yield more than 20 gigabases of mappable sequence data, or 400 million tags per run.
This improvement in data output per run is expected to further decrease the cost of genomic sequencing for multiple applications, including DNA, RNA and epigenetic analysis.
By providing the life science community with access to high quality genomic data at a lower cost per sample, researchers will be able to accelerate disease association and biomarker discovery studies to improve diagnostics and disease management.
The Solid platform features an open-slide architecture that offers scalability to accommodate an array of applications in a cost-effective manner.
The combination of increasing bead density, extending read lengths to greater than 50 base pairs, high accuracy, and multiplexing capability of up to 256 samples in a single run, will enable the Solid 3 system to generate approximately seven-fold coverage across the entire human genome.
This will enable researchers to extract more meaningful biological information with fewer samples.
Other key enhancements provide a more efficient workflow, including simplified sample handling, optimised chemistry for improved performance, automation for unattended operation, enhanced software algorithms to streamline data handling, and a suite of bioinformatics software tools to expand the breadth of supported applications.
The Solid 3 system offers a complete workflow solution for many applications such as whole genome sequencing, targeted resequencing, whole transcriptome analysis, gene expression profiling, small RNA characterisation, methylation profiling, and chromatin-immuno precipitation sequencing analysis.
These productivity and performance enhancements will enable genomic, transcriptomic and epigenomics studies on a single platform, which should enable researchers to take a comprehensive molecular approach to understanding complex biological systems.
