A SUBSIDIARY of BGI, MGI Tech, announced it had launched two new next-generation genetic sequencers, MGISEQ-2000 and MGISEQ-200, at the 12th International Conference on Genomics in Shenzhen yesterday.
The products were unveiled at the conference themed “Omics for All – Global Partnership,” which was held at the China National GeneBank from Oct. 26 to Sunday.
BGI president Wang Jian said he hoped the new products could be affordable and a benefit to people all over the world, summing up his intention to “lower the price, save the life.”
MGI vice president Jiang Hui said the new sequencers will deliver consistent high-quality sequencing data faster and at a lower price. MGISEQ-200 and -2000 are upgrades to BGISEQ-50 and -500 with technological improvements.
“MGISEQ-2000 and -200 can complete one run with PE100 read length in less than 48 hours, which provides our partners high-quality service and data even more rapidly to help patients,” said Jiang.
“We have made significant improvements in the industrial design of the sequencers and optimized the chemistry, which will allow our customers to operate the sequencers in their labs at a lower cost,” said Liu Jian, MGI vice president.
MGISEQ-2000 and MGISEQ-200 can run with at least four different read lengths, providing flexibility to cover a wide variety of applications across genomic research, clinical diagnosis, agriculture, forensics and environmental engineering. “With our R&D team’s great efforts, we have managed to make sequencing more affordable and of better quality and performance,” he said.
Several partners involved in the early testing of the new technology said it demonstrates significant improvements over existing technology.
“MGISEQ-2000 is a great choice for genome sequencing. We can see both the consistency and data quality are satisfied, as well as an obvious improvement compared to BGISEQ-500,” said David Smith, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Technology Assessment Group at the Center for Individualized Medicine, one of the early evaluators of MGISEQ-2000. The Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit medical practice and medical research group based in the United States.
MGI Tech’s overall goal is to make the MGISEQ a versatile and open sequencing platform, said MGI CEO Mu Feng. MGI plans to release sequencing adapters and the test data to encourage users to develop their own applications on the MGISEQ platform.
“This will help us speed up the technology’s development and production, and provide better tools and services to our customers,” said Mu. “We aim to innovate new technologies to help people live a healthy life.”