Illumina Reagent Volumes And Recipes

Someone on the Discord was asking about reagent volumes used on different Illumina sequencing platforms. As far as I’m aware there’s no public disclosure from Illumina on reagent volumes. Of course, you could probably pull the reagents out of a kit and measure them if you wanted to.

However, I don’t have any kits. What I can do, is look at the various Illumina “recipe” files scattered around the internet.

Recipes files tell a sequencer when and have much of each reagent to send to the flowcell. While you won’t file recipe files for every Illumina instrument online, I’ve been able to dig out recipes for the MiSeq, HiSeq, NovaSeq 6000 S2, and NovaSeq X 10B.

I can’t be sure these are the “standard” recipe files. But they seem worth a look anyway! From these I extracted the various reagent steps for a deblock/incorporation cycle. They are all tabulated in this google doc.

If we just look at this total reagent volumes, things look a little odd!