MGI Demonstrates Success of New CoolMPS™ Sequencing Chemistry on PCR-free DNBSEQ™ Platform

HOUSTON, TX, UNITED STATES - Oct 18, 2019 - MGI, a subsidiary of global genomics leader BGI Group, said early research results from its revolutionary CoolMPS™ proprietary sequencing technology performed with high accuracy, reproducibility and cost effectiveness, leading the way toward more efficient and accurate Massively Parallel Sequencing (MPS). MGI also reported that its DNBSEQ-T7 genetic sequencer, the world’s most powerful, was successfully delivered to multiple customers in China.

At the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG 2019) annual conference in Houston, MGI presented data using CoolMPS™ chemistry on MGI’s DNBSEQ™ PCR-free sequencing platform. Results were comparable to existing platforms.

“We are very encouraged by these early results,” said MGI Chief Scientific Officer and Complete Genomics Co-founder Rade Drmanac. “We are seeing at work a combination of higher quality and efficiency of CoolMPS chemistry and PCR-free/error free cost-effective DNB nanoarrays. Together these two MGI technologies are redefining Massively Parallel Sequencing and establishing MGI as the innovation leader.”

A fundamentally unique chemistry, CoolMPS avoids DNA "scars" that can accumulate with traditional sequencing methods and affect the accuracy of subsequent reads. CoolMPS introduces unlabeled nucleotides and four fluorescent labeled antibodies in its sequencing process to recognize the incorporated bases. In this new process, the natural scarless bases are added in each sequencing cycle, enabling more accurate and longer reads.

Improving the quality while lowering the cost of high-throughput sequencing through these new technologies and advanced engineering can help to drive implementation of genomics-based health monitoring and other applications that require comprehensive, accurate and affordable sequencing-based tests, greatly expanding MPS applications.

One of the early access collaborators using the CoolMPS chemistry still in development is Jimmie Ye, Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco’s Institute for Human Genetics.

“We sequenced single cells multiplexed from many samples with both the Illumina NovaSeq 6000 system and an early alpha version of the CoolMPS sequencing kit in development at MGI,” Prof. Ye said. “We see comparable results on cell calling, clustering, sample demultiplexing, and cell classification with CoolMPS, which is very exciting progress.”

Prof. Andreas Keller, Scientific Director of the Center for Bioinformatics at Saarland University, also reported promising results. Prof. Keller, who is also doing research at the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University, presented results of his research on the non-coding Alzheimer’s transcriptome using an alpha version of the CoolMPS kits.

“We are really impressed by the high sequencing accuracy,” he said. “The accurate base calling resulted in a significantly higher fraction of mappable reads. That is a clear and strong advantage with CoolMPS. The technology itself is highly reproducible.”

CoolMPS™ is available to selected early access partners or research collaborations for co-development and validation.

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