Ultima Genomics UG200 Sequencing

The UMGC’s highest-capacity sequencing instrument, the UG200 from Ultima Genomics, is an ultra-high throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS) instrument purpose-built for the most sequencing-hungry applications. Radical cost reduction is at the core of its design, a system architecture that reflects the UG200’s Silicon Valley roots. The bottom line: innovative hardware and chemistries enable human genome sequencing for $60 in raw sequencing reagent cost at 30x depth.

Technology

The UG200 replaces a traditional flow cell with a massive, open-to-the-elements, flat circular silicon wafer (the foundational material of the semiconductor industry). During sequencing operation, this disk spins – like a CD or disk drive – enabling reagent dispensing (“spin-coating”) and continuous data acquisition from two fixed-position cameras. This inversion of the standard architecture – a moving wafer substrate, with a fixed camera as opposed to a fixed flow cell substrate with a moving camera – accelerates sequencing and throughput. A ≥ 300-base median-length run is completed in roughly 20 hours, in either single-end (1 x ≈ 300) or paired-end (2 x ≈ 160) mode.

The UG200’s chemistry is also a departure from common single-base extension methods. Sequencing read-out is “flow-based”: only one type of nucleotide substrate is introduced per data capture cycle (a “flow”), thereby reducing errors by eliminating the need for base-calling. Because the UG200 employs flow-based read-out, resulting read lengths are a distribution. With yields of up to 20B billion reads per wafer, this translates to up to 6  terabases of data per run.

A more complete discussion of the technology behind the UG200 can be found on Ultima’s website and also in the foundational paper describing the technology.