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Stratos Genomics Discloses $2M Financing Round

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Sequencing technology developer Stratos Genomics said today that it raised $2 million in Series A-5 financing in the fall of 2013.

The company said that the funding was contingent on the demonstration of sequence read lengths of 210 bases for its Sequencing by Expansion, or SBX, technology. The SBX approach converts DNA into a surrogate molecule called an Xpandomer that is read via a nanopore detector.

Stratos said it used the additional capital to help simplify the SBX probe library used to synthesize Xpandomers. For the company's proof-of-concept work to date, it has used a library of hexamer probes, each of which encode for a 6-base probe sequence. Stratos said that it recently synthesized a new single-base expandable nucleotide that reduces the library requirement to four — one for each base.

Stratos Genomics CEO Allan Stephan said in a statement that the firm is currently finalizing its commercialization strategy.

The $2 million financing, led by Fisk Ventures, follows funding of similar amounts in 2012 and 2011, plus $4 million raised in 2010.

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