2012 Update to the NGS Field Guide

After many months of essentially no updates worth mentioning, Ion Torrent announced their Proton sequencer on the morning of January 10th, followed later that same day by an announcement from Illumina of their upgraded HiSeq 2500. This of course, caused some significant heartburn to all of us who were several months into the process of writing NSF equipment grant proposals (and had 2 weeks to modify them).
This was followed by the “megaton announcement” of the gridION and minION nanopore sequencers at AGBT in February. Now, we’ll have to see if anyone gets a sequencer funded from all those NSF proposals written prior to Oxford Nanopore’s announcement.
After some grieving, I put together the update for the 2012 Field Guide. I have done my best to make the comparisons apples to apples, but that’s pretty tough to do with the nanopore sequencers (there is no set run time or number of reads, length distributions are unknown, etc.). So, you will see that I’ve had to be kind of creative in some places, and the numbers may well be overly optimistic.
Nick Loman has some nice summaries of the Proton and Nanopore sequencers. Keith Robinson’s OMICS! OMICS! posts on the nanopore sequencers, Ion Torrent, and MiSeq (as well as others) are also insightful.
Hopefully these updated Field Guide tables will be of some utility to folks:
2012 NGS Field Guide