How To Build A Sequencer
Recently I’ve been investigating how practical it would be to bring up a complete “Solexa-style” DNA sequencing reagent kit.
By “Solexa-style” I mean using an approach similar to that used on the original Genome Analyzer. This is pretty similar to that currently used on Illumina’s MiSeq and now off-patent.
What’s surprised me is how well developed the ecosystem around NGS reagents has become. You can find vendors to supply (and have already made) oligo lawn coated surfaces, build them into flowcells, and to supply appropriately labeled reversible terminators. For me this is “the hard stuff”, with suitable polymerases and rest of the reagents being much easier to source.
The startup costs seem to be relatively low. $50K could be enough to get moving on a new design and get a proof-of-concept down.
Not only that, but I’ve seen multiple vendors offering nanoimprint solutions for NGS with practical demonstrations. So your route to a high density patterned flowcell might not be too difficult either!
So there’s this whole ecosystem of vendors now able to support sequencing platform development with companies specializing in:
Surface functionalisation
Flowcell assembly
Patterning
Nucleotides
What does all this mean? Well… in a lot of ways it’s probably bad news for folks like Singular. Why buy a sequencing company when you can build one cheaper?
This might be why according to rumors1 on the Discord acquisition talks with 10X broke down. Given that 10X have most of a sequencer in their Xenium platform anyway, they could likely buy in the rest of what they need from external vendors for less than Singulars market cap.
As such, they might still be interested in acquiring Singular, but the terms may well not have been very attractive.
This whole “opening up” of the NGS consumables ecosystem seems very exciting though. I look forward to seeing what innovations we’ll see with more companies able to access the basic technology.
Rumors are just that… and you probably should take them with a pinch of salt as they often come 2nd or 3rd hand.