SPRI-TE Illumina library preps

[GW_OK]

We're currently mulling the purchase of a Beckman SPRI-TE instrument for Illumina library preps. While the rep has nothing but sunshine and rainbows I've heard a few oblique references to less than stellar performance from other sources. Does anyone have an experience with this system, for better or worse? Does anyone have experience with some other sort of automated library system (other than home-brew)? I know Illumina is going to release a system with Tecan but from what I hear it's way more throughput than my lab needs.

[Baseless]

Hello GW,

we just purchased one, since it claims to be able to do both Roche&Illumina Preps. What I can say after a few days is the following: The usage is pretty simple and the device itself looks pretty robust. We are currently making first libraries with it, and as far as we can tell by now, it seems we are able to prep Illumina Libs, since we can do PCR on the adapters afterwards, however, we have not sequenced one yet, I will try to update once we did.

On the Roche site, our Problems are a bit more grave. Beckman adapted the SPRI-Works II Kit to the Titanium rapid generation of reagents. Thats a good move considering the amount of sample needed, but since most of my Roche projects involve SequenceCapture, it leaves me in the cold, since I have to use oldshool titanium adaptors which use blunt end ligation instead of T/A overhangs.
I grabbed a Roche MID-Adaptor TCB and redesigned the adaptors to have appropriae overhangs - but yet, our first attempt to ligate them ended in failure (library had the right size, but I was unable to amplify it for SeqCap). Currently I think my adaptor annealing or production of the adaptors was bugged, we are retrying this with new adaptors as we speak. But if anyone has overcome this, any input is appreciated.
What I think is a bit odd about the machine, is that they apparently dont sell their DNA blood extraction kit in europe.

[NextGenSeq]

Our Illumina rep strongly advised against it. Admittedly this may be since they will be coming out with their own automated library prep.

[GW_OK]

Anyone have any more thoughts about this? Beckman's lowering their prices and we're about to bite.

[snetmcom]

works fine. Makes great libraries.
You'll have to buy modules for every library type you want to make... that's pretty much the only downside. 3.5-4hr library time.

[csquared]

We've been using one for a couple months now and it does work as advertised. However, my advice is to carefully negotiate reagent costs as Illumina, NuGEN and others are releasing automation-friendly reagent kits in the next couple months that are substantially less expensive than the reagent costs on the Beckman. The only other observation is that the total post-ligation yield is a bit under what we see for the traditional manual preps and post-ligation yield is a strong indication of complexity. On the other hand, their 200-400bp size selection method gives a very uniform and consistent fragment size, much better than other current bead-based methods.

Overall, if you can justify the reagent costs, the platform works very well. Illumina preps are about 5hrs for 10 samples and you need to supply the adaptors so factor that in to cost calculations.