10X Genomics Commences Shipments of the GemCode™ Platform

10X Genomics announces the full commercial release and availability of the GemCode Platform with instrument shipments and installations actively underway. Announced at AGBT 2015 in February, the GemCode Platform is a unique molecular barcoding and analysis platform that consists of instrumentation, reagents and software, which delivers long-range information, including haplotype phasing, structural variation, and other critical genomic information. By upgrading existing short read sequencers the GemCode Platform generates a powerful new data type: Linked-Reads. 

“Broad researchers are excited to start generating 10X data,” said Stacey Gabriel, Director, Genomics Platform at the Broad Institute. “With the GemCode Platform now installed, we will soon deliver Linked-Reads for a range of applications including structural variant detection and haplotype phasing. This technology will be a great addition to the suite of sequencing offerings we make available to the scientific community.” 

The GemCode Platform partitions arbitrarily long DNA molecules (including > 100kb) and prepares sequencing libraries in parallel, so that all fragments produced within a partition share a common barcode. A simple workflow combines large partition numbers with a massively diverse barcode library to generate >100,000 barcode containing partitions, while only requiring ~ 1ng of DNA input. 

“10X Genomics is enabling researchers to routinely access genomic information that was previously difficult or impossible to obtain,” said Serge Saxonov, CEO of 10X Genomics. “At AGBT, we committed to commercial shipments of the GemCode Platform in the second quarter of this year, and are very pleased to have met that goal with shipments to multiple customers. We are well on our way to changing the definition of sequencing.”