March 2024 ngsspecs update

The specs of Next-Generation Sequencing companies

This is a March 2024 update on the Next-Generation Sequencing offerings by the main companies in NGS.

Illumina recently announced they were going to start shipping the NextSeq2000 P4 kits, and I can now confirm that the price per Gigabase will be $9/Gb. This is half-way through the previous minimum for NextSeq2000 kits and the NovaSeq6000 $6/Gb mark.

Element Bio is now probably the fiercest competitor to the NextSeq2000, at least in the Western World. Their best pricing is $6/Gb, or 50% cheaper than the NextSeq2000 P4.

Singular Genomics has similar offerings in the mid-throughput segment, but importantly, they recently announced a multi-omics enabled G4X instrument, which wants to shake the current dominance by the 10X Genomics / Illumina duopoly.

Below are the offerings from MGI Tech (also known as Complete Genomics in the US).

In the ultra-high throughput segment, both MGI Tech DNBSEQ T20x2 and Ultima Genomics UG100 instrument aim at carving market share away from Illumina’s NovaSeqX. Here are the specs for Ultima Genomics.

This summarises the main offerings with numbers we can trust. Below I’ll show the numbers I have gathered for PacBio and Oxford Nanopore, which have been contended and thus don’t have the same level of assurance as the above.