Three Hacks to Get More Data from Your Illumina Sequencer

h/t: KeithRobison of OmicsOmicsBlog

Biotechniques published an informative commentary for those looking for ways to increase throughput from their Illumina machines.

Hack 1.

Illumina sequencers normally fragment DNA into short pieces before anchoring it on the surface of the flowcell. This hack allows researchers to flow longer pieces of DNA onto the flowcell, performing the final library preparation steps in the flowcell itself, in order to get sequence information the most cost-efficiently from long molecules instead of short.

Hack 2.

High-throughput sequencing-fluorescent ligand interaction profiling, or HiTS- FLIP for short. Basically, adding fluorescently-tagged proteins directly to an Illumina flowcell to analyze protein-DNA interactions.

Hack 3.

Lane-by-lane sequencing with an Illumina Genome Analyzer II. Modifications allow researchers to use the GAII with fewer than the standard eight lanes.

Biotechniques webpage has lot more details on how and why they work, and who discovered them.