iGenomX Riptide Kits Promise a Sea of Data

A theme for me in my six years on Starbase has been addressing the challenge of cost-effectively sequencing many small genomes.   While sequence generation bulk prices have plummeted, all-in library construction cost has tended to stubbornly resist dramatic change.  Large genome projects don't face quite such a pinch, but if you want to sequence thousands of bacteria, viruses or molecular biology constructs, paying many-fold more for getting a sequence into the box than you're paying to move it through the box ends up being a roadblock. Illumina's Nextera approach dropped prices a bit, but not really a sea change.   Various published protocols drop  costs further via reagent dilution, but these can suffer from variable library yield and an increased dependence on precise input DNA quantitation and balancing.  Even then, the supplied barcoding reagents for Nextera handleat most 384 samples, and that is only a relatively recent expansion from 96.I previously profiledseqWell's plexWell kits, which like Nextera use a transposase scheme but with modifications to enhance tolerance to input sample concentration variation.   plexWell also enables very high numbers of libraries, which better mates projects with large numbers of small genomes to sequencers with enormous data generation capabilities.  Now comes another entrant in the mass Illumina library generation space: iGenomX, which has reformatted their chemistry from amicrodroplet mode intended for linked r...
Source: Omics! Omics! - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Source Type: blogs