Next-gen sequencing pioneer Illumina says it may soon usher in the era of the $100 genome — which could, in theory, make consumer genomics orders of magnitude more accessible.
CEO Francis deSouza on Monday unveiled a new machine, called the NovaSeq, at this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. He said the machine’s scanning speed has increased to a pace that could unravel the DNA of an entire human genome in an hour.
Some caveats right off the bat: Even if it is that fast, it’ll still take much longer to actually interpret the data. And while deSouza promised the new machine is “expected one day” to allow for a genome to be sequenced for $100, the company isn’t quite there yet.
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I call B.S. They just lost the lawsuit against Oxford Nanopore and now they’re trying to dangle the possibility that they can compete with nanopore’s cost. I really doubt they can with the current technology they’re using.
I’m sorry, but no-one from Illumina has said soon. The NovaSeq will one day be capable of $100 genome, but at the moment, the library prep alone costs $150, and then sequencing comes on top. Best price from NovaSeq is $1000 per genome. It will take years before we hit $100.
See http://www.opiniomics.org/hiseq-move-over-here-comes-nova-a-first-look-at-illumina-novaseq/ for more technical detail