A Bird’s Eye View of the NGS Market

CLC Bio has published the results of a survey of researchers in the next-generation sequencing market to find out which sequencers and software are used the most.

The company says it received responses from 708 individuals in 73 countries.

Not surprisingly, they found that Illumina’s HiSeq and MiSeq are the most used instruments with about 34.6 percent and 21.3 percent of respondents, respectively, stating that they use the systems. Meanwhile, Roche’s 454 sequencers got 21.2 percent of the votes and Life Technologies’ Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine got 11.5 percent of the responses.

In terms of bioinformatics tools, the UCSC Genome Browser has the most use, according to the survey, with 28.9 percent of respondents reporting that they use the program. Next in line is Ensembl tools and then Bowtie with 26.9 and 23.4 percent of the votes, respectively.

Also worth noting is that NGS is being used primarily for whole-genome sequencing — 40.8 percent of the votes — followed by RNA-seq and de novo sequencing with 40.1 percent and 39.8 percent of the votes, respectively.

Of the 708 respondents, about 24.6 percent work in the US, according to CLC. Also, 73 percent of respondents work in academic research while 9 percent work in industry, another 9 percent in government, and 6 percent work in not-for-profit organizations, according to the survey.