Microbial Diversity in the Era of Omic Technologies

Table 2

Technical specifications of Next Generation Sequencing platforms.

Platform	454	Illumina	Life technologies ABI/SOLID	Helicos biosciences heliscope	Ion torrent	Pacific biosciences
Year of availability	2005	2006	2006	2007	2010	2010
Sequencing length	200–700 bp	Up to 150 bp	35–50 bp	25–55 bp	~200 bp	1500 bp
Sequence yield per run	700 Mb	2–600 Gb^a	120 Gb	35 Gb	20–50 Mb on 314 chip; 100–200 Mb on 316 chip Gb on 318 chip	100 Mb
Run time	23 h	27 h–11 days	7-8 days	3–6 days	2 h	2 h
Technology	emPCR, pyrosequencing	Polonies, cleavable dye terminators	emPCR, ligation with cleavable dye terminators	True Single Molecule Sequencing (tSMS)Single base, reversible dye terminator extension reactions	emPCR, H+ detection	Single Molecule Real Time (SMRT) sequencing dyes that are phospholinked to the nucleotide, very sensitive fluorescent detection in zero mode waveguides

a2 Gb for the MiSeq and 600 Gb for the HiSeq2000.