Suma J, Sivakumar G
Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is revolutionizing the study of “omics” (e.g., genomics, transcriptomics, methylomics, etc). The sequencing cost has gone down tremendously and thereby allowing most of the methods to deviate from microarrays and traditional Sanger sequencing. Illumina has the highest market share in NGS followed by Thermofisher Scientific, Roche and Pacific Biosciences. They currently sell the following instruments: HiSeqX series, HiSeq series, MiSeq, NextSeq and MiniSeq. With the arrival of HiSeqX, Illumina projects that the cost per Gigabase has gone down from $100,000,000 in the year 2000 to $1-10 in year 2014. Read-length, run time bacterial genome sequencing and maximum throughput on different platforms is reviewed in Van Djik et al., and the number of applications that can be performed using NGS is increasing every day. They can be categorized into three areas as described below.