454 LIFE SCIENCES MASSIVELY PARALLEL SYS.:DNA SEQUENCING - DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Relevance. There is a growing need across the research, pharmaceutical and clinical communities for low-cost, high throughput, genomic sequencing. Comparative genomics, SNP and haplotype analyses have shown tremendous potential to characterize individual susceptibilities to many chronic and acute diseases or disorders. Additionally, genomic data will lead to advances in agriculture, environmental sciences and further our understanding of evolution and ecological systems. However, the cost of sequencing mammalian-sized genomes is currently too high and we remain too far away from being able to afford the use of comprehensive genomic sequence information on a routine basis, in part because such large-scale sequencing requires a great deal of equipment and is labor intensive. Of equal importance with a significant decrease in cost, is the need to develop a complete platform that brings to any research laboratory the capability to perform sequencing of sizable organisms without a large and expensive infrastructure. Background. 454 Life Sciences has developed a massively parallel, high-throughput sequencing system, designed to simplify, parallelize and speed up all aspects of sequencing viral and bacterial genomes, from sample preparation, through amplification and sequencing, to data processing and assembly. There is one sample preparation and one amplification process for a whole genome, done without need for robotics, cloning or colony picking, by one individual, in one laboratory. That same individual can do whole genome sequencing on a single high throughput instrument that simultaneously sequences all fragments in hundreds of thousands to millions of picoliter-scale reaction wells, and performs basecalling and scaffolding in real time, with consensus accuracies of > 99.99%. Currently, sequencing of viruses and bacteria is performed at a throughput of 5 Mbp/hour. Under a recently funded NIH grant, 454 will be scaling up this system to perform paired-end sequencing of whole genomes up to the size of small fungi: Projects. We will further expand the existing platform to handle resequencing and de novo sequencing of mammalian genomes at very low cost and high accuracy in 3 projects: (i) Scaling the 454 hardware to achieve two orders of magnitude reduction in the cost per base, at a throughput of up to 50 Mb/hour, and at an accuracy of > 99.99%. (ii) Extending the 454 molecular biology to very small beads and to combined read lengths of 400 basepairs with paired-end sequencing of very long fragments, (iii) Extending the modular assembler algorithms to allow the use of large-span paired-end reads, leading to resequencing and de novo assembly of mammalian-sized genomes. 454 relies on a very talented, multi-disciplinary team that encompasses engineering, molecular biology, chemistry, software and bioinformatics groups. The hardware, fluidics, optics, software and bioinformatics efforts will be led by PI Dr. Marcel Margulies. The molecular biology, chemistry and sequencing efforts will be led by co-Pi, Dr. Michael Egholm. This facility will cover less than 3,000 sq. ft and be staffed by less than 10 personnel. We will be ready to deploy such a facility commercially at other sites at the end of year 3.
