Illumina buys microfluidics company

[GW_OK]

So Illumina's purchased Advanced Liquid Logic with an eye towards automating nucleic acid isolation and library making.

I'm sure lots of people will immediately recognize their microfluidic technology as the tech inside the Nugen Mondrian. Will Illumina coopt Nugen now or will they cut off the IP? Anybody got a Mondrian and like it? We demo'd one, were a bit "meh", and passed on purchasing, but the droplets marching around were certainly fun to watch.

[kmcarr]

Could this purchase be meant to complement the Moleculo IP they picked up earlier this year? The Moleculo protocol depends on isolating large (10kbp) fragments by limiting dilution to permit unique barcoding of sub-fragments. A microfluidics platform would certianly make that easier.

[NextGenSeq]

I doubt it's for Moleculo which uses clonal PCR and is more similar to Fluidigm. It's probably for standard NGS library prep.

We find for our library preps the input samples vary so much that automating it isn't worth it. However, we do mostly ChIP-Seq and RNA-Seq.

[Genohub]

Illumina is most likely looking to develop a library prep platform for low input samples. Similar to the Mondrian.

[Richard Finney]

Illumina : http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=ILMN...=on&z=l&q=l&c=

big jump in stock price over previous days close > 10%

Press reports don't seem to be connecting the surge over yesterdays close with the purchase of Liquid Logic .

In an otherwise mundane press release from Illumina ( http://investor.illumina.com/phoenix...ews&id=1840193 ) [ that actually uses the word "holistic" ] , the company says ...

for clinical and applied markets, where ease of use and consistency are especially valued, it will allow us to offer integrated, end-to-end solutions

So I guess this stuff really is going mainstream clinical.