454 Life Sciences, a Roche company, announced at the recent Association of Molecular Pathology Annual Meeting in Florida a series of developments that expand the company's sequencing portfolio.
The company has introduced the GS Junior System, an affordable bench-top sequencing platform slated for release in 2010.
The GS Junior System, which is no bigger than a typical laser printer, is tuned to fit the needs of small to medium-sized laboratories.
The platform will launch with long-read GS Junior Titanium chemistry, offering 400-500bp read lengths, and will be shipped with a desktop computer that is optimised for GS Junior Run processing and downstream data analysis.
454 Life Sciences has announced plans to initiate an early-access programme for the development of the next set of performance improvements to the Genome Sequencer FLX System, which will double the read length of the current GS FLX titanium kits and contain reads up to 1,000bp.
The DOE Joint Genome Institute will be the first site to begin early access later this month and will use the long-read chemistries to sequence a variety of large, complex genomes.
Additional early-access partners are expected to be announced in the near future.
Michael Egholm, chief technology officer and vice-president of research and development at 454 Life Sciences, said: 'The value of our longer read lengths, coupled with the latest advances in our assembler software, has been demonstrated by the conclusion of a number of recent de-novo sequencing projects, such as the cod fish genome.
'The Genome Sequencer FLX System provides a robust platform to sequence and assemble nearly any size genome quickly, without the need for supplementary Sanger data,' he added.
The company's final announcement at the event was the launch and immediate availability of several new kits, protocols and software updates for the Genome Sequencer FLX System.
The products enable two new application areas to take advantage of the 400-500bp reads and increased density of the GS FLX titanium-series chemistry-transcriptome sequencing and amplicon (PCR product) sequencing.
Additional product updates include a new rapid library preparation kit that takes around half of the time and requires less input DNA and a set of 12 rapid library multiplex identifier (MID) adaptors for sample pooling.
Improvements to the complete suite of GS Data Analysis software are shown in the new GS De Novo Assembler software, which is now capable of processing datasets from human-sized genomes (3Gb) and transcriptomes.
Together, the new cDNA sequencing protocol and assembler software offer a complete solution for de-novo transcriptome sequencing and analysis, enabling a picture of the gene space of nearly any organism, even previously uncharacterised species.
Egholm said: 'We are finding that the long EST reads generated by the Genome Sequencer FLX System often readily span multiple exons and are aligned with a high degree of uniqueness when analysed with our new transcriptome assembler software.
'We believe this solution will yield significant advantages over existing approaches due to the ease of assembly and the ability to characterise alternatively spliced transcripts for a wide range of organisms, without the need for a reference,' he added.
Lastly, the latest set of GS FLX titanium kits include a new solution for targeted amplicon sequencing applications, now supporting the ultra-deep sequencing of long 400bp amplicons.
According to McLeod, GS FLX Titanium Amplicon will give amplicon designs similar to those currently used in Sanger amplicon sequencing the additional benefit of up to one million clonal reads per run.
