NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Applied Biosystems announced today that the Broad Institute will add five new SOLiD Systems to its arsenal of sequencing technologies. The systems will be used in projects aimed at characterizing the genetics behind cancer and other human diseases.
Among their research efforts, scientists at the Broad are working on uncovering the single-base changes and structural variants contributing to cancer. Using the SOLiD Systems, the team hopes to catalogue the genomic changes associated with various types of cancers in order to better understand the causes of these cancers and improve treatment.
With the addition of the five new machines, the Broad will reportedly have a total of eight SOLiD Systems.
“The SOLiD System technology has scaled significantly since its commercial availability just one year ago,” Chad Nusbaum, co-director of the Broad’s genome sequencing and analysis program, said in a statement. He said that Broad researchers would “further test SOLiD’s accuracy rate and throughput capabilities on these cancer genome projects.”
With its existing collection of SOLiD Systems, Broad researchers are sequencing as many as 13.4 billion bases per run. According to ABI, the new SOLiD 3 System is capable of generating 20 billion bases of mappable sequence data per run in customer laboratories and more than 25 billion bases of mappable sequence data in ABI R&D facilities.
The SOLiD 3 System, which comes either as an upgrade to existing platforms or as a stand-alone instrument, is expected to be available worldwide by early next year.