454 Life Sciences Launches the GS FLX Titanium Series Reagents, Replacing Traditional Sanger Sequencing

454 Life Sciences Corporation has announced the launch of the new GS FLX Titanium series reagents and software that are transforming the life science’s industry.

According to Company, the new reagent kits provide individual sequencing reads with an improved Q20 length of 400 base pairs and a five-fold increase in throughput to 400 - 600 million base pairs per instrument run.

The new level of performance solidifies the position of 454 Life Science as the new gold standard in sequencing, effectively replacing traditional Sanger sequencing for most applications.

A testament to the transformational power of these new performance advancements is the increase in unit placements at major North American genome centers. While Baylor College of Medicine was the first to install ten Genome Sequencer FLX units, Washington University in St. Louis was quick to follow with an increase to eight units. The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard now has ten units installed and the Joint Genome Institute has increased their install base to eight units.

The first GS FLX Titanium series kits were delivered for development and evaluation purposes to these centers earlier this year. Feedback on the performance of the reagents and software has been very positive, confirming the strength of the new system. In fact, major genome centers have already put the GS FLX Titanium reagents into production.

The new technical performance was achieved through advancements in reagents and software, while not requiring any instrument hardware changes. As a result, current users of the Genome Sequencer FLX System are ready to take advantage of these advancements without any costly instrument upgrades.