Over at GenomeWeb, everyone’s favourite after CoreGenomics ;-), there is some coverage of an Illumina conference call. One statistic stood out for me and that was the “average annualised consumable utilisation of HiSeq”, I think this is how much each HiSeq owner spends on consumables. Apparently this is $299,000.
I was a little surprised as it equates to only 25 or so paired-end 100bp runs, the kind being used in Cancer genome projects across the world. Even back in 2010 the figure was $400,000 or about 35 PE100 runs.
Why aren’t we (as a group) spending more?
If you are operating an instrument feel free to drop me a line and discuss!
My guess: people who bought new sequencers with ARRA funding, and now have neither the people nor the finances to run them hot, are dragging the average down.
Maybe we need more samples and lesser throughput 🙂
The bottleneck now is data analysis. People would just feel bad in generating more they can analyze and publish.
Is it just because with longer reads there are more cycles meaning longer time per run which means fewer runs per year? Ours is running at full capacity all year by the way.
We've noticed this drop since moving from the GA to the HiSeq. More data has meant a higher degree of multiplexing, requiring greater effort on the library prep side of things. This has definitely slowed down smaller labs like ours (even with automation). It also means that one tends to run the full 100bp read length rather than the shorter ones, just to have enough samples to fill
I agree with all those points. Especially attempting to organise mulitplexing (going from one sample per lane on the GAs to 4,5 or 6 on the HiSeq does create bottlenecks). For an academic group, there is probably 40 working weeks in the year (slackers). If you assume it's around 1.5-2 weeks to cluster a flowcell, sequence, data QC, analyse and feedback results, then 25 runs seems about right.