While its announcement of a new low-cost sequencing platform caused one blogger to lose some sleep, Illumina has Forbes' Matthew Herper contemplating the consequences of the Life Technologies Ion Personal Genome Machine's new competition within the sequencing market. Like the Ion PGM, Illumina's new machine — the MiSeq — is affordably priced, and could bring sequencing to smaller labs. The Broad Institute's Chad Nusbaum tells Forbes that the MiSeq may be fast enough — Illumina says the machine can "go from purified DNA to analyzed data in as few as eight hours, or to generate in excess of 1 gigabase per run in slightly over a day" — to be used in hospitals in the future. Forbes' Herper adds that unlike the Ion PGM, however, MiSeq is based on exisiting technology — it's a "smaller, faster" HiSeq, he says.
Julia Karow at our sister publication In Sequence has more on MiSeq's specs, and Edward Winnick at GenomeWeb Daily News has additional comments from Illumina CEO Jay Flatley, who spoke about the machine's launch at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco this week.