New workflow automation system from Illumina

At the 59^th annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) announced the launch and immediate availability of cBot, a new standard for ease-of-use and sequencing workflow automation.

cBot is a revolutionary plug-and-play, user installable system for clonal amplification of sequencing libraries. Its automated design eliminates user intervention and enables clonal amplification to be performed in four hours with less than ten minutes of hands-on time. cBot innovations include ready-to-use, pre-packaged reagents, simple touch-screen operation, and browser-based remote monitoring. High quality results are assured by smart sensors that monitor instrument performance, combined with new chemistry and protocols that deliver higher density clusters and improved sequencing accuracy.

Illumina’s proprietary cluster generation process offers major advantages over competing emulsion PCR-based methods in terms of simplicity and hands-on time. cBot now widens that gap by minimizing user touch points, improving chemistry for higher quality results, and decreasing hands-on time to less than ten minutes. “The ease of use of the Genome Analyzer workflow continues to be one of the key advantages of our system,” said Tristan Orpin, senior vice president of Commercial Operations at Illumina. “cBot further simplifies the workflow and makes sequencing operations even more efficient. To use cBot, customers simply insert the pre-configured reagent rack along with the flow cell and their samples, and press start. Through this and other innovations, such as accurate long reads of 2 x 100 base pairs delivering outputs in excess of 50 gigabases, Illumina is dramatically scaling the output and performance of NGS technology.”