Not me, the center. It became official this morning: The Genome Center at Washington University will buy 21 additional Illumina GAII sequencers.
Illumina must be absolutely loving this conference. They presented some very impressive plans for improvements (reads out to 250 bp) by the end of 2009, and apparently WashU decided to double down on the platform.
This will bring our total count to something like 35 Illumina/Solexa machines, which officially puts us ahead of Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (24). With this capacity we’ll be able to sequence an entire human genome to 25X coverage in a single day. Incredible.
As part of the medical genomics analysis team, I was immediately thrilled at the news. Then, I remembered that someone has to analyze all of that data…
Good thing we have Dave Larson. Yeah, I’m looking at you buddy!
I don’t know if all of them are unpacked and rolling, but the Sanger got a new batch of Solexa and is now close to 40.
Albert’s right, we have 37 machines – I’m pretty sure the most recent 11 have all been unpacked now.
What do we win?
Dan, we’re looking forward to scaling up our computing resources to help take on all of this extra data and associated analysis. Let’s take this new plethora of data and turn it into discoveries!