Life Technologies Ion PGM Sequencing 400 Kit

Life Technologies Corporation has announced a 400 base-pair sequencing kit for the Ion PGM Sequencer. The kit is claimed to read 60% longer than comparable high-throughput benchtop sequencers, generating more complete bacterial de novo assemblies with longer contiguous sequences.

The Ion PGM Sequencing 400 Kit is suitable for applications that require capturing all the genetic variation in a long exon on a single read. For instance, long reads are critical for researchers trying to interpret genetic data from human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes or 16S ribosomal genes.

It is said that sequencing the V1-V2 region of the bacterial 16s rRNA gene would not be possible on the Ion PGM without the longer 400 base-pair reads. Using 400 base-pair reads allows scientists to increase the information density of the amplicons and better define the constituents of complex microbial populations.