Accelerate your Medical Research Using the Roche/454 Genome 20 System
Since the advent of DNA sequencers that use chain terminators, sequencing genomes or large number of PCR amplicons continue to be a massive undertaking that involves large infrastructure requirements. Details of a novel instrument for DNA sequencing that circumvents sub-cloning requirements and achieves a 100-fold increase in throughput over current Sanger sequencing technology in a 5 hour run will be presented. The instrument uses fused fiber-optic bundles in a slide format [picotitre plate (PTP)] that contains 1.6 million wells. Genomic DNA is subjected to solid-phase amplification in emulsions after the DNA is randomly fragmented. Beads that contain amplified genomic DNA are deposited into the wells of a PTP and sequencing-by-synthesis (using pyrophosphate-based sequencing optimised for solid supports in picolitre wells) is performed to obtain average 100-base reads. The 100-base reads are aptly suited for miRNA sequencing/SAGE analysis and data from these studies will be discussed. In addition, the unprecedented speed and sensitivity of the GS20 system allows detection of low frequency somatic mutations in cancer as well as SNPs & indels at the population level.