New Life Technologies 400 base-pair Sequencing Kit for Ion PGM™ Sequencer

Ion 400 base-pair kit enables world-class bacterial assembly, HLA and 16S ribosomal gene sequencing, capping off another year of market-leading innovation.

Life Technologies Corporation announced a new 400 base-pair sequencing kit for the Ion PGM™ Sequencer. The kit produces reads 60 percent longer than comparable high-throughput benchtop sequencers, generating more complete bacterial de novo assemblies with longer contiguous sequences.

"Ion Torrent's long, accurate 400 base pair reads enable excellent bacterial de novo assembly," said Professor Dag Harmsen, Head of Research, Department of Periodontology, University of Muenster, who used the Ion PGM™ Sequencer to help crack the E. coli outbreak in Germany in 2011. "Paired-end sequencing is not required to get the best results."

The Ion PGM™ sequencing 400 kit is ideal for applications that require capturing all the genetic variation in a long exon on a single read. For instance, long reads are critical for researchers trying to interpret genetic data from human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes or 16S ribosomal genes.

"Sequencing the V1-V2 region of the bacterial 16s rRNA gene would not be possible on the Ion PGM™ without the longer 400 base pair reads," said Dr. George Watts, Research Assistant Professor and Co-Director, Genomic Shared Service, University of Arizona Cancer Center. "Using 400 base pair reads allows us to increase the information density of the amplicons and better define the constituents of complex microbial populations."

Ion Torrent continues to see rapid increases in accuracy on its Ion PGM™ and Ion Proton™ Sequencers as a result of consistent improvements in its algorithms. The new Torrent Suite v3.4 incorporates algorithmic improvements in both raw accuracy and consensus variant calling. These improvements enable both the Ion PGM™ and Ion Proton™ semiconductor sequencing platforms to routinely achieve greater than 99.996 percent consensus accuracy.

Life Technologies is also introducing two additional products, capping a year of extraordinary innovation that made the Ion PGM™ Sequencer the fastest-selling sequencer in the world:
•    The Ion Total RNA-Seq Kit for AB Library Builder™, which is designed to make cDNA library preparation for the semiconductor sequencing simple, fast and flexible. The Ion Total RNA-Seq Library Kit for AB Library Builder™ System enables the construction of cDNA libraries from both whole transcriptome and purified small RNA (miRNA) populations, allowing researchers to analyze all types of RNA molecules.  
•    The Thermo Scientific® MuSeek™ Library Preparation Kit, provides a fast and simple transposon-based method for preparing high-quality genomic DNA libraries for the Ion PGM™ Sequencer. The kit utilizes MuA transposase enzyme for fragmentation and simultaneous tagging of the target DNA, eliminating the need for separate shearing and adaptor ligation steps. Life Technologies is excited to offer this new kit, which enables library construction in as little as 90 minutes, resulting in significant savings in time and cost.

The Ion Torrent products discussed in this press release are for Research Use Only, not for use in diagnostic procedures.