Scalability – Twice the bases

The central idea behind Ion Torrent has always been to bring the power of semiconductor scalability to the life sciences. The Ion 314 chip is the first in a series of products that leverage decades of semiconductor technology advances, enabling us to bring the entire semiconductor design, fabrication and supply chain infrastructure — a trillion dollar investment — to bear on the challenge of sequencing. Simply by moving to a newer semiconductor fabrication plant we can increase the density of wells on our chips by 10-, 100- or 1,000-fold, taking advantage of decades of Moore’s Law advances in a single stroke.

While semiconductor technology enables us to make chips that are literally perfect, the molecular biology reactions that occur on the chip are something that developers constantly strive to improve. There is a learning curve for all sequencing technologies during which the developers work to get a higher yield, e.g. to get more of the reactions to work on the chip.  There are 1.4 million sensors on the Ion 314 chip and from those we get about 100,000 high-quality reads, of 100 bases or more, which is exceptional for the first iteration of a sequencing product.

However, as sequencing technologies mature, historically it’s typical to get 80 percent efficiency. If we have 1.4 million sensors on the Ion 314 chip, we should be able to get over 1 million reads. The scalability challenge is to find a way to double the yield on Ion chips. Because we are constantly getting more reads and longer reads from each chip, the winner of this challenge will have to provide a 2X improvement in the number of high quality bases across our available chips. The benchmark accuracy that challengers must beat will be the best yield achieved by the Ion Torrent labs as measured during a head to head bake off.

Solvers will need access to commercially available PGM and Torrent Server to develop and test their proposed solution. 

Submission Details

A successful entry to the Scalability Challenge will include:

• Written protocol submitted to InnoCentive, Life Technologies’ open innovation platform provider, with detailed descriptions of the necessary protocol and time estimates for completing the described.
• One Torrent Server Report file, uploaded to InnoCentive, per run from both human and bacterial genomic DNA.

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