Illumina's new sequencers: HiSeq, GAIIx, GAIIe or iScan-Seq

[PG_ResGen]

5th NGS

Don't forget about their acquisition of Avantome in 2008. Illumina will be releasing a bench-top sized pyrosequencing machine later this year with ~2-3Gb output for the lower end of the NGS market.

[simonandrews]

I suspect there may be possibilities to increase the data volumes on GAIIe to GAIIx levels but on a system that costs significantly less.

The Illumina documentation I saw said that you could upgrade a GAIIe to a GAIIx at any point so I suspect there is a hardware difference between the two - maybe just a limited imaging area or reagent volume?

I'm sure that eventually, like many previous technologies, this sort of sequencing will end up being the almost exclusive domain of high-throughput service providers. Whilst we're still in a state of flux though I think there is ample scope for departments or big labs to usefully run their own - though this isn's something to be undertaken lightly. We've certainly benefited from being able to get into the guts of our systems to both sort out problems and also figure out better ways of analysing our data. Turning sequencing into a commodity service only really becomes feasible when everyone wants the same thing and you can set up a big pipeline to pump the data out, and I'm not sure we're there yet.

I'm still interested to get more details about the HiSeq (do you guys actually have one?). The improved automation is potentially good if they've got it right. At least with a GAII you can get your hands on all of the main components and diagnose and fix problems for yourself. Given the amount of time one or other of our GAIIs has been out of action I'm not sure I'd want to swap them for a single HiSeq until I was really sure they'd ironed out all of the bugs.

[james hadfield]

So Illumina now have four sequencers available; GAIIx, HiSeq, GAIIe and iScan sequencing module (are they still doing this?). All offer exactly the same applications, biochemistry and data. But they differ in output.

The GAIIx, GAIIe and iScan seq module (? but I will not really consider it here any more) use the same flowcells but generate very different amounts of data. How do they do this? Is it a smaller camera or fewer tiles? Could it be lower cluster density? Or is the data slimmed down computationally? With any of these I suspect there may be possibilities to increase the data volumes on GAIIe to GAIIx levels but on a system that costs significantly less.

Which one would you buy? Do PIs really want this in their lab, I know egos can be large enough but wallets have a limit. Surely it makes more sense for groups to come together to get the output of HiSeq with only the overhead of one instrument, and a significantly easier one to operate based on my experience and current understanding of HiSeq.