MGI Announces April Availability Of Sequencers, Reagents In US
By Bio-IT World Staff
February 21, 2020 | MGI, part of global genomics leader BGI Group, announced the commercial availability of its sequencing instruments and reagent kits in the United States based on MGI’s own innovative CoolMPS sequencing chemistry, starting in April of this year.
MGI is planning to roll out its G series DNBSEQ sequencers first in Q2 and then its T series DNBSEQ sequencers in Q3—both received market approval in Asia and Europe in January—and it will take steps to launch its innovative CoolMPS sequencing kits along with its family of library preparation kits to enable whole genome sequencing, whole exome sequencing, RNA sequencing, metagenomics sequencing, single cell sequencing and more.
MGI’s DNBSEQ sequencers will combine the high accuracy and cost-effective PCR-free core patterned array technology (DNBSEQ) with its unique DNB library and the higher quality and efficiency of CoolMPS antibody-based chemistry to redefine Massively Parallel Sequencing. A recent publication in bioRxiv (DOI: 10.1101/2019.12.20.885517) demonstrates up to a 55% reduction in WGS indel errors on the PCR-free DNBSEQ platform compared to PCR-cluster-based sequencers and provides a comprehensive overview on how DNBSEQ works.
MGI has continued to drive technology innovation on the DNBSEQ platform, introducing proprietary CoolMPS as the first nucleobase specific antibody-based sequencing chemistry in 2019 and working with partners and collaborators around the world to demonstrate its outstanding performance. Now, with the launch of its sequencer in the US, CoolMPS has been demonstrating its exceptional sequence quality, including single-end 400-base reads (bioRxiv, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.19.953307) and its adaptability in a variety of applications to fulfill MGI’s commitment to making sequencing reads cleaner, longer and more accurate.
CoolMPS technology is a fundamentally unique antibody-based chemistry that 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. The advantages of CoolMPS include: a stronger signal and higher signal-to-noise ratio, no signal quenching and base scarring, less systematic sequence-based errors, and significantly better cycle-completion performance enabling longer MPS reads. The CoolMPS chemistry is compatible with all commonly used library preparation methods.
More than 1,600 MGI sequencers, including DNBSEQ-T7 made available last September, have been installed worldwide, serving more than 460 customers in 38 countries.
