Illumina's Reusable Flowcells

I’ve often thought it would be neat if you could reuse flow cells. Splitting a 300 cycle MiSeq kit over 10 runs, a ~$60 run would be pretty cool for some applications!

The prospect is perhaps even more attractive on NovaSeq flowcells. These are substantially more expensive to fabricate (due to patterning and use of fused silica).

It seems very practical too, after all you’re clearly not exhausting all the primers on a MiSeq flowcell. I’ve often wondered if we couldn’t just terminate existing clusters and grow some new ones?

Well… it seems Illumina have been thinking flowcell reuse too!