Ion Torrent Reports 265 Base Pair Reads

By Bio-IT World Staff

August 5, 2011 | Late Wednesday, Life Technologies released an application note and supporting data for the Ion Torrent Personal Genomics Machine reporting reads up to 265 base pairs in length using E. coli data. The average read length over the 350,000 reads was 163 base pairs.

The total per-base accuracy for the PGM sequencer is 1.2%, and the error rate for the Ion PGM at base 150 was 2.99%. An error curve for the Ion PGM across all bases is relatively flat. According to the Life Technologies, this demonstrates the robustness of semiconductor-based sequencing.

Based on these read rates and error rates, Life Technologies predicted that the Ion PGM sequencer read lengths will continue to increase rapidly toward the goal of highly accurate 400 base pair reads by 2012.

The full application note and the data are available here.