I may be behind the times a bit, but I’ve just run across the cutest little circa $100,000 (? my guess ?) DNA sequencer in the land (Press Release.)

You can see some opinion on the machine over at Pathogenomics. All points presented are certainly true:

• library construction needs to be easier
• reagents need to be less expensive
• etc.

One thing that’s not mentioned, where I think this machine will be quite useful, is in the methods development and/or amplicon/sequence capture spaces - essentially those areas in which we are either trying to or succeeding at changing the initial focus of 454 sequencing from vertical (depth of coverage) to horizontal (breadth of coverage).

1. a smaller platform for testing new sequencing techniques would be super handy - particularly if/when library prep is simplified and costs are reduced. Overall, small-run efficiency should be greater as you’re using the entirety of the plate for each run (i,e. you won’t loose reads from areas of the plate covered by a gasket) and costs should be lower as a result of increased efficiencies and direct reductions in time and reagent prices. I guess that I am sort of thinking of it as a rapid application development tool, but within the genomics/genetics sphere. The assumption would be that once the method is working, you scale up to the “full” 454 run.

2. Within the amplicon/sequence capture sp here, the machine should be of sufficient size for daily to weekly runs and likely of sufficient size to track the workflow of several lab employees. Assuming that the gsjunior will return roughly 80,000 reads (from the 100k spec.), we get a theoretical coverage of 10X across 1000 loci from 8 individuals. Similarly, if we expand to 96 individuals, we’re going to get around 10X coverage of 80 loci (or @ 8X we can get roughly 100 loci per 96 individuals).