Key Insights

Sequencing companies frequently launch new instruments and chemistries at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference.

This year, companies competed on pricing for bulk sequencing and showcased new multiomics chemistries.

Spatial transcriptomics and proteomics also showed up at the meeting, with a notable push toward 3D tissue measurement.

Geneticists and instrument vendors gathered in Orlando, Florida, last week for the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) conference, which showcases the latest in DNA sequencing. The roughly 1,000 attendees included bioinformatics researchers, sequencing core directors, pharmaceutical genomics research teams, investors, technologists, and instrument makers introducing their newest wares. C&EN caught up with attendees and vendors after the meeting to hear about how it went. They say the meeting reflected a competitive market for next-generation sequencing (NGS) and increasing interest in spatial multiomics.

Pricing conversations dominated a crowded NGS field

“Usually, AGBT is about new product launches,” says Puneet Souda, who covers life science tools for the healthcare investment bank Leerink Partners. “This one, I would say pricing was number one.”

Last year, Roche’s announcement of its sequencing-by-expansion chemistry stole the show. This year, analysts like Souda watched for a pricing announcement on the instrument, dubbed Axelios, to assess whether Roche could shake Illumina’s command of the clinical NGS market. Medical applications are the largest part of the sequencing marketplace and are poised to continue growing. Roche’s established expertise in diagnostics made an upset look possible, but based on the new sequencer’s price, speed, and accuracy, Souda judges a major shift unlikely for now.

In the research segment, though, the NGS marketplace is crowded and hotly competitive. Ultima Genomics attracted particular attention with its launch of a sequencer and workflow that offer bulk whole-genome sequencing for $80 a genome. Complete Genomics and Element Biosciences also launched new instruments at or just before the meeting.

“I think the cutting edge is going to be fast, flexible, low-cost sequencing,” says Graham Wiley, who directs the genomics core at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and was at AGBT to scope out the latest instruments.

For sequencing applications that require recognizing a read well enough to count it, without absolute certainty about every nucleobase—assays like RNA sequencing, single-cell sequencing, and proteomics—Axelios is priced to compete. “Places where you need a whole bunch of reads . . . Axelios is going to be unbeatable,” Wiley says.

Companies offered more assay types on each instrument

Flexibility in sequencing is key, according to Rob Tarbox, vice president of product and marketing at Complete Genomics. “The ways people are using [sequencing]—how they’re operating the machines, and also what they’re using the machines for—is starting to get increasingly more varied,” Tarbox tells C&EN. “And I think because of that, the machines themselves need to be more flexible.”

One way to be more flexible is to offer more assays on the same instrument, often by converting other types of biomolecules into DNA for short-read sequencing. There is a bustling multiomics marketplace for measuring genomes alongside epigenomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, and other bulk datasets. Vendors at the meeting showcased chemistries for studying DNA methylation, single-cell transcriptomes, proteomes, and chromatin organization—frequently on the same machine.

The meeting also featured an Illumina launch that purports to bridge the gap between short-read sequencing, Illumina’s specialty, and more-comprehensive, but more-expensive, long-read sequencing. Piecing together certain parts of the genome has traditionally required longer reads on instruments from PacBio or Oxford Nanopore Technologies. (Illumina once tried to buy PacBio but dropped the deal in response to antitrust concerns.)

Instead of breaking up DNA to load a library of fragments into the sequencing flow cell, Illumina’s new workflow involves cut-and-paste enzymes that slice DNA right on the cell and tack it into place. Information about the longer original DNA is preserved in the relationship between adjacent reads. The technique can run using existing top-end Illumina instruments. Cande Rogert, Illumina’s head of advanced science, tells C&EN that meeting attendees were keen on adding new capabilities without investing in a new platform.

Spatial biology pushed into a third dimension

AGBT is also, increasingly, a showcase for instruments for spatial biology, a fast-growing field that involves pinpointing the location of RNA and protein molecules en masse. Tarbox calls the meeting “a tale of two technologies: one of spatial, and one of sequencing.”

Many spatial approaches overlap with sequencing. For example, some workflows convert molecules’ locations into DNA barcodes to read via NGS. Others amplify RNA transcripts in fixed tissues to enable fluorescent probes to bind.

Whereas spatial omics assays usually require tissue cross-sections just a few micrometers deep, the start-up Stellaromics debuted an instrument at AGBT that can image RNA in a tissue section of about 100 µm—roughly the depth of a sheet of printer paper. Jeremy Lambert, the firm’s director of product management, says the instrument combines confocal microscopy and sequencing fluidics to image a panel of more than 200 RNA transcripts at a time. The instrument can identify messenger RNA bound to ribosomes for active-translation purposes, and Stellaromics has piloted protein imaging as well.

Wiley, the researcher who was shopping at the event, says Stellaromics is the first to arrive at an application that will soon be widespread. “They’re going to get some early mover advantages,” he says. Though the current instrument has some room to improve, he anticipates that “by the end of the year, it’s going to be impressive.”

Laurel Oldach is a senior editor and life sciences reporter at C&EN.

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