New reagent kits

[yaximik]

I just received 2013 price list. Aside about $200 hike for standard MiSeq reagent kits, I noticed new micro an nano kits, which are cheaper than standard kits for the same number of cycles. My understanding from previous discussions that micro and nano cells are the same standard cells with etched-out tiles. That is the volumes should be the same - what makes kits cheaper then? Has anyone seen these kits yet?

[mcnelson.phd]

Here's the information that I know from Illumina so far:

The standard kits image 14 total tiles on both surfaces of the flow-cell. Micro kits will image 4 tiles on both surfaces while the Nano will image only 2 tiles on one surface. The different flow-cells will come in color coded vials so you know which is which.

As for the price differences, the reagents themselves are pretty cheap compared to the flow-cell itself, so my presumption is that the Micro and Nano flow-cells are cheaper to produce and that more pass quality control, thus lowering the cost of the kit overall. Illumina also is making pretty nice margins off these kits, so there's probably a lot of price discrimination going on.

The question is why would anyone use a Micro or Nano kit over a standard kit given that the price difference isn't that great compared to the yield you get. Since these kits are supposedly going to be marketed as a way to validate your library, I can see the justification that choosing a Nano kit over a standard 50 cycle will give you a better idea if things are going to work as expected.

Finally, I can't wait to hear what the mad-hatters at the Broad do with these kits.

[GenoMax]

Micro and nano kits allow for extremely fast runs. For some applications it may be justifiable to pay the price for this convenience.

[TonyBrooks]

We potentially have a few projects that just don't need 15 million reads. It's actually beneficial for us to do two Nano runs and process twice the number of samples than one V2 run with more reads per sample. At the moment, we're limited by the number of indexes we have.