Eyebrows were raised when we heard that the latest Solexa-technology sequencer would be called the Illumina HiSeq 2000. This kind of futuristic name was big in the 80s – remember Grecian 2000? – but in 2010 it sounded a bit on the lame side when we first heard it… but were Illumina just toying with us?
James Hadfield, my partner in crime on the sequencing map project, reports on Seqanswers he’s got his installed and his first run yielded a theoretical 300Gb of data. And he speculates, given how easily it cranked that out – and given Illumina’s great success in juicing throughput with the GA2 – perhaps the HiSeq 2000 is named thus because Illumina expect to get throughput up to 2000Gb (2 terabytes). It’s a rather tasty idea. 33 human genomes at 20x coverage per run?
On the subject of the sequencing map, the sequencer categories have been updated to cope with the new machines: HiSeq, PacBio and SOLiD4 and I’ve taken the decision to dump the collection of array technologies. Not so much a comment on these technologies but a lack of interest from the community in keeping track of them.
The sharp-eyed will notice is that although Illumina announced they had shipped 100 HiSeq’s “for revenue” just a couple of days ago the sequencing map is already tracking over 160 in the wild. How to explain? Well, BGI stake their claim to 128 HiSeq’s on the map but there is a strong suspicion that these are not all installed yet. If you know what is going on, please contribute an update.
Update 13/08/2010: This interview with Paul Tu suggests there are currently 40 HiSeq’s installed at the BGI. The map has been updated accordingly.
GS Junior is potentially even more lame – harkening back to the ill-fated IBM PC Jr.
I have gotten my first Illumina 2x100bp run, which did produce a pretty good assembly