Ion Torrent Releases Data for 316 Chip from the genome of the E. coli DH10B laboratory strain.

As Life Tech's Ion Torrent nears an early July launch for the Ion 316 chip for its Personal Genome Machine, the company last week released a dataset for an Escherichia coli genome on its website that it generated internally on the new chip. In addition, several early-access customers — including the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine and the Broad Institute — have tested the 316 chip, beating Ion Torrent's own R&D teams on throughput in some runs.

The E. coli dataset, approximately 150 megabases from a single run on the 316 chip and posted in the "Torrent Dev" section of the company's "Ion Community" website, comes from the genome of the E. coli DH10B laboratory strain. According to Ion Torrent, the data contains no more than 1 error at read lengths of 100 bases, and there are 69 errors in the entire genome.

The 316 chip will represent a 10-fold increase in throughput over the 314 chip that the company currently markets for the PGM. "We made enough progress on the 316 that … we feel it's a good time to put data out so folks can look at it and analyze it in different ways," said Maneesh Jain, Ion Torrent's vice president of marketing and business development. 

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